


Somefin's Gotta Give

by godalming



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Boarding School, M/M, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-29
Updated: 2015-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-06 20:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/739806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/godalming/pseuds/godalming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave applies to boarding school as a joke. A joke, okay? That 70 hours of volunteer service and the A in English on his application were LIES. Meanwhile, Karkat has been waiting to get in for years. The two of you are the worst pair of roommates ever, and the rest of the student body isn't any more sane. Everything interesting at Santa Rayar Academy for the Academically Gifted is lead by a fishy student council president, a preaching prefect who breathes social justice, a teenage milf, and other exciting characters you know and love. Fun fun fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Smuppet Limbs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I said I was never going to finish this fic, I fucking lied. 
> 
> Two years after publication, in celebration of (holy christ) canon davekat?!?! I wrote the last chapter. And then went back and cleaned up all of the rest so that they didn't sound like they were written by ninth grade me anymore. So enjoy, guys. Thank Hussie for making dreams come true, and then hopefully not crushing them again three updates later.

Your name is Dave Strider, and you swear to all that is holy you are going to flip your shit if you have to see another cow. 

It was three hours ago that you had begrudgingly loaded half of your possessions into the cramped trunk space of your bro's Volkswagen Beetle and set off on the ride of your life. You had squished into the back seat, next to a tobacco tin filled with sewing supplies and a few crumpled up brown paper bags from various fast food joints, and you'd tried your absolute best not to think about where you were going. "You know," you had grumbled to Bro somewhere in between Houston and Bumfuck Nowhere, "I'm gonna get out of the car and walk the fuck home the moment we get there." Bro failing to respond verbally as usual, instead let you know what he thought of that by cranking up Beethoven's Symphony #9 on the car stereo. A few minutes later, he pulled a couple of pamphlets off of the dashboard and tossed them over his shoulder at you. One hit you in the face, and you promptly chucked all of them out of the window. You'd read them all before, anyways.

It was two hours ago that you made a pit stop at a shitty convenience store in a town with a name that sounded like a dirty joke. Something like "Friendswood" or "Dickinson"; you were texting all of them to Rose as you went, but you weren't really keeping track yourself. Bro had pulled over at the first gas station he saw and while he was preoccupied at the pump, you had ducked behind the car when he wasn't looking and taken off into the town. You hadn't gotten far when he tracked you down again, sitting against a brick wall next to a dumpster in the gravel of the alleyway behind the local health food store. You were clutching an unopened bottle of organic apple juice, freshly shoplifted no less than five minutes ago. "Get up," he'd muttered, "You're gonna get dust all over my seats." It took you three minutes to actually pull yourself out of the dirt and find your way back to the car. You left the juice on the ground.

It was one hour ago that you finally squeezed the last dregs of battery juice from your iPod and was forced to resign yourself to cow watching. Without the sweet sounds of amateur hip hop on maximum volume deafening you, it became much more difficult to forget about where you were headed. Cow counting, while a fascinating and worthwhile hobby, didn't make for a good distraction. So, even though the only school pamphlets you hadn't incinerated in your neighbour's microwave or hidden in the dishwasher were currently sitting on a gravel road you would probably never see again, you could picture them pretty clearly in your head. All of the Microsoft office fonts and pictures of kids with phony grins. 

"Santa Rayar Academy" was splashed across the front in a hideous light blue shade of Bradley Hand ITC, which in your opinion was an even greater offence than comic sans. Under the title sat a group of racially diverse ninth graders, flashing pearly whites at the cameraman and holding dictionary-esque textbooks, like 'fuck yeah college level chemistry'. 

You'd never wanted to actually attend Saint Rayon, or whatever the hell the place was called. In fact, it was decidedly one of the last establishments you'd want to be stuck in, up there only with the set of The Muppets or Chuck E Cheese. The sort of schools where parents paid to claim their kids were smart had never really sounded like your kind of atmosphere. In fact, that was exactly the reason you'd signed up,

Applying to Santa Rayar had been nothing more than the latest venture in your endless pursuit of irony. Because you were as good in math classes as you were at bullshitting applications and lying, you were pretty sure you were going to get in, but you were never actually going to go there. It had seemed like a good idea, one more item to add to the ever growing list of 'funny things Dave has pointlessly done'. You figured Bro would be proud of it in one way or another. You would tack your acceptance letter to the wall above the headboard of your bed and continue attending your shithole of a public high school, exactly where you were meant to be.

However, in the July after you graduated grade nine, something unexpected happened.

Apparently, unbeknownst to you, your apartment complex had been on the edge of bankruptcy (and in heavy denial about it) since April. It was only in the summer that it's owners finally ran out of cash, and it had been such an unprofitable business that no one else even wanted to buy it. The tenants who were living there had, up until a week before the building’s closing, been left unaware of this turn of events. It was only two days before the place was set to be bulldozed when you found the letter in your long neglected apartment P.O. box. Everyone else on your floor had moved out by that point, and the following night was a frantic blur of rushed, sloppy packing. You and your bro had gotten the place boxed up by 6AM the next day, and left, exhausted, in a hastily booked moving van just as the sun began to peek over the horizon. 

The rest of the summer had been excruciatingly long and very slow, a reel of back to back hotel hopping and days and nights spent alone in identical suites slowly exhausting the novelty of room service menus and pay-per-hour video games. Bro split all of his time between his day job (a heavy lifter at a plumbing supply factory), his night job (a DJ at Houston's skid row dance clubs), and finding an affordable place the two of you could live. As a result, your frequency of communication with him gotten so bad that you spoke mostly to each other through sticky notes left on fridge doors. It was only on what was supposed to be your first day of grade 10, literally on your way out of the fucking front door, that he caught you and apologetically explained that you would not be attending South Houston Public that year but rather Santa Rayar boarding school. 

He'd been crunching some numbers, he said, and he'd come to the conclusion that keeping you in your old school, or consistently attending one school for that matter, would have been extremely difficult what with all of the moving around you had been doing lately. Factoring in the scholarship you had somehow managed to earn, as well as a bit of financial support, he had realized that the price of sending you to the boarding school would actually be similar to the cost of yearly bus fair for the crazy routes you would have to take. His statistics sounded a bit sketchy to you, but despite all of your superficial protesting you went along with it anyways without too much of a fuss. The fact that this would make things easier for your brother was all persuasion enough, and it was a sacrifice you were willing to make. He had promised you that he would have a place rented and paid for by the end of your first semester, and if you wanted to you could come home then. You weren’t exactly pleased with the circumstances. But you couldn't change them, either. 

You groaned a bit, and shifted around in your seat. Fuck. This was exactly the kind of downer shit you didn't want to think about. Bro was still tapping his gloved fingers on the car's steering wheel to the beat of the Fur Elise, and the sun shining in through the window felt like it was starting to burn a stripe into your neck. You hadn’t seen any cows for a while. Finally, feeling miserable and defeated as all hell, you turned to what may have been your last source of entertainment. For a few seconds, you groped around in the pocket of your hens until your fingers finally closed around the cheap plastic shell of your cell phone. It was an ancient, shitty thing compared to the level of tech that was your iPod; one of the flimsy early 2000s models with terrible signal and a slide out keyboard. You liked to tell anyone who asked why you didn't just get an iPhone that you struggled with your 7 year old Nokia every day for irony's sake (an excuse your peers quickly got tired of), but in all reality the only reason you hadn’t upgraded to even a fucking Blackberry or something was that you were as broke as the goddamned apartment building you used to live in. 

If it had been a decent phone, you would have unlocked the screen, but because it wasn't you somewhat aggressively flipped it open and started flicking through the so called "apps". Briefly, you hovered over Pesterchum, but ultimately decided against it. Rose had informed you earlier that her phone was confiscated during a math test because of you, Jade didn't like it when you were bitching about things, and John just would have laughed at your misery and compared this road trip to the plot of RV. Instead, you kept clicking through until you reached a trial poker game (playable for a whopping 30 seconds at a time) and opened that. The game’s 8-bit soundtrack had just started blaring from the tiny speaker at the bottom of the phone, before it...stopped. Looked like it was frozen. Again. With a sigh, you shoved it back in your pocket and slumped against Bro's purple zebra print seat covers. 

“Bro. Hey, bro.” Those were the first words you’d said to him in a few hours. 

He turned around to look at you, taking his eyes off of the highway for a moment and angling a piercing gaze through his sunglasses and straight past yours. “Yeah?” The sunlight glinted off of the tips of his black triangular frames, four point sparkles drawn on by a girls' manga artist. It pissed you off.

“How much longer do we have to fucking drive?” 

A chuckle escaped from his throat, and he turned back to the road. "Are we there yet?" He mimicked, raising his voice an octave or two to be extra mocking. “Yeah. We'll be there soon, okay? Be patient.” 

You pursed your lips, drawing them down into a tight grimace. “No, I mean exactly how much more time am I gonna have to spend fucking surrounded by boxes of severed smuppet limbs?” While you didn't actually know what was in the boxes, there was a very good chance that at least one contained exactly that. The thought of opening a box to find the torn off stump of a Smuppet leg made you shiver. The longer you looked at it, the more likely it seemed. 

“Chill out, little bro.” He moved one of his hands from the wheel and pointed at something ahead of you, squishing his index finger against the windshield. “You see that blurry looking square up ahead?” 

There was, indeed, an out of focus box shape resting against the horizon. You sat up straighter, and leaned forward to shove his arm out of the way and get a better look. “Is that it?” you muttered, squinting beneath your shades. “Didn’t look that fucking cubic on the pamphlets.” 

He smirked, and made a sharp turn to the right. The road beneath you was suddenly much bumpier than before, and the view out of the front windshield was rapidly obscured by a thick cloud of gravel and dust. “What, you actually read those?” 

“Fuck off. Hey, where are you-" you started, but you didn’t need to finish your sentence. As the dust began to clear away, it became obvious that the industrial looking square in the distance was, in fact, not your future school. Upon further reflection, this was actually a bit of a disappointment. About 1000 yards down the road, surrounded by a tall hedge and what looked like a very ornate electric fence, was the most stereotypical British-soap-opera school you had ever seen. It was still kind of a blob from this far away, but from what you could make out...were those spires on the roofs? 

Yes. Yes, they were.

The campus was split up into a number of off white plaster buildings, presumably the different dormitories and subject oriented classroom blocks, all scattered about a massive and immaculately pruned courtyard. It had a kind of ornate feel to it, from the aforementioned roof spires to the greek column window and door frames. Sculpted hedges and trimmed trees and carefully planted tulips were growing throughout the grounds, all strategically placed for maximum 'fantasy boarding school' effect. The entire area was surrounded by terracotta coloured brick walls, topped with cast iron fencing that came up just a little bit above your head. You swore if you squinted at the nearest building you could make out a roof garden and window seats. Good god. This wasn't a boarding school, this was what some starry eyed author who had never set foot in a boarding school fantasized about one being like. It was so ridiculous that you loved it. 

The gravel road crackled quietly beneath the Volkswagon’s tires as Bro turned and pulled into a short cobblestone driveway in front of the main gate. There was a booth beside it, containing a scowling middle aged woman, whom Bro stopped next to. “Name, please?” she grunted, typing something into a desktop computer that was probably older than you.

“Strider.” Bro pulled his license out of his wallet and rolled down the window a few inches farther, leaning out. Suddenly realizing you were being watched, you peeled your face away from the glass of your window and pushed your sunglasses up your nose, attempting to regain as much dignity as you could. 

“ID, please?” She turned towards your brother, narrowing her eyes briefly before snatching the license out his hand and swiping it through a scanner. “Mr. Strider," she stated, as though she was confirmed his identity to him. Then she handed the card back along with a few colourful papers, tapped a couple more pieces of data into a program titled 'Admissions'. "You're free to go in, she said. From your place in the car, you could see her switching back to a YouTube video. “Baby Eats Lemon", apparently. You wondered how she got a video to load in the first place on a computer that only had the capacity for dial up Internet.

In front of you, the gates swung open, and the car advanced through it into the school grounds. With a rustle of paper, bro tossed the few thin neon brochures he'd gotten from the booth last back at you. For a moment, they fluttered through the air, until they found their way into a surprisingly neat pile on your lap. Bro turned around again to give you the most intimidating glare he could pull off while wearing his ridiculous shades. “Don’t fucking chuck those ones out the window, they’re probably important. Maps and shit.” But from what you had seen during the two seconds you glanced at them, none were anything that would be legitimately useful, just a couple of ads soliciting for donations to the school's clubs. More in indignance towards bro than an actual distaste for the pamphlets, you rolled them up and shoved them into the handle hole on the smuppet limb deposit box. And you were pretty sure bro saw.

“So where are we going...?” you asked, although you couldn't actually give less of a fuck what the answer to that was. “Don’t we have to talk to an advisor or something?” You seemed to be moving towards the building in the middle of the grounds, with the giant clock above the door, but to your surprise the car instead lurched to a short stop.

“We're not goin’ anywhere.” Bro flashed you a halfhearted grin, keeping his foot pressed on the brake. For some reason you were irritated that he didn't even bother putting the car in park. There were a number of sheets sitting on the passenger seat, which he began rummaging through, picking out a select few and shoving them at your hands. “There’s a map of the grounds, room address, couple a’ things you need to submit...yeah, from here on out you’re on your own, little man. Go find your dorm. Tell your roommate I say hi. Phone me later. Alright?” 

“Uhh...okay.” you stuttered. Sure, you'd phone him. He probably wouldn't pick up, but you'd phone him anyways, just to give him the comfort of seeing your name on the missed calls list.

He pressed a key into your palm and popped the trunk. “Good luck.” 

It had been so long since you last stood up that you took almost two minutes just stretching your legs out after getting out of the car. The air here was a lot cooler than you were used to, and the usual Texas humidity had turned to a kind of clammy cold. All of the moisture and none of the heat. You hadn't thought you were _that_ far north of Houston. Resisting the urge to shove your hands in your pockets, you instead crumpled the papers bro handed you into balls and shoved them in there instead. As though you’d ever learn to respect official documentation. Your suitcase was actually so pathetically light that you could carry it slung over your shoulder, which you supposed had a bright side in that it looked cool. As he pulled back out on the roundabout he had stopped on, your brother sent you one last weak two finger salute from behind the wheel before apparently flooring the gas pedal and tearing out of the school grounds the way you came. You returned his gesture by flipping him off, which seemed a fitting goodbye, but he was too busy dodging groups of teenagers in the road to catch it.

'Where the fuck am I going?' you muttered. You'd kind of just chosen a random direction and taken off that way across the courtyard, failing to pay attention to where you were walking. While you might have refused walk around hiding behind a map, you were quickly realizing that you'd at least have to know your room number to be able to find it. You reached into the pocket of your jacket once again, pulling out the paper baseballs one by one and quickly unfolding them. Room 212, it turned out, in Dormitory Block C. It was kind of located at the back of the grounds, but you didn’t much trouble finding it. Room 212 was only a short elevator ride up from the empty beige lobby below, about two thirds of the way down the hallway.

There was a loud bustling coming from inside, followed up by muffled cursing and a few stomps. Seemed either the cleaning lady had some serious issues, or you hadn't been the first one to get here. Briefly, you debated with yourself whether you should simply unlock the door and barge right in or have the courtesy to knock. Common sense suggested it would be best to not be an asshole as a first impression, but just as you were raising your fist to knock the door swung open, clunking against the wall behind it.

Kindly, your roommate welcomed you to Santa Rayar with a box to the face. 


	2. God Damn It, Read the Maps

It really spoke volumes for how much the universe was working against you that you'd manage to fuck things up with your new roommate before you'd even seen his face. 

Panic battled with a deep sinking feeling as the box of DVDs you were carrying quite securely just five seconds ago spilled out of your arms and cascaded down upon the person at the door; a powerful waterfall of Rom-Com. One side of the box hit the guy square in the forehead, knocking him backwards onto the ground in the hallway. Mint condition copies of classics like “Rumour Has It” and “Over Her Dead Body” poured out from the box’s opening and onto the carpet around him. On the cover of Just Go With It, Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler smiled up at your misfortune. Shit. 

"Jesus! Fuck! I am so sorry!" you yelled, caught between a stutter and a shriek, and sounding angrier than you should have. 

He rolled around on the floor beneath you for a few moments, letting out a low groan and pushing his sunglasses up his nose. "Hello to you too," he mumbled. You offered him a hand, but he didn’t take it, and stood up slowly with the assistance of the door handle and the wall.

 “Do you want some help...?” you muttered. He was still a bit wobbly. Maybe if he took off the fucking sunglasses, he'd have an easier time catching his balance. It seemed odd that after almost being knocked unconscious the first the he did was fix his sunglasses, but you weren't in any position to criticize him here. He shook his head lightly, wiped some blood away from his nose, and staggered into the room, dragging his suitcase behind him.

You followed. You weren't 100% comfortable with leaving your DVDs lying in the middle of the hallway, but it would be alright for now. For all of the pride you took in your collection, it seemed unlikely that anyone would want to steal them. Placing a hand hesitantly on his shoulder, you tried to nudge him into turning towards you so you could get an idea of just how much damage had actually been done to his face. “Look, man," you tried again, "are you fucking alright?”  

“Yeah, m’fine, he mumbled, and he reached up and pried your hand off of him. "Didn't your mom ever wash your mouth out with soap?" Limply, your arm fell to your side. You were a bit taken aback. 

“Shit. Sorry. Remind me next time I offer to help you that you’re an aloof ass.” You took a few steps back, towards whichever wall was closest behind you, shoving your hands into the pockets of your jeans as a sense of dread seeped in. Was this guy always going to be liked this? Was he just really thrown off by the fall? You were going to be stuck with him for an entire year. Maybe a boarding school, of all things, wasn’t such a good idea. 

Your thoughts were cut short when a hand was thrust in front of your face. 

“The name’s Strider. Dave Strider.”  Miraculously, Dave had transferred from looking both annoyed and on the verge of passing out to...smug. What the fuck? You looked up at him, and he was smirking down at you, lips curled up into an comedically pleased smile. Narrowing your eyes, you  took his hand and shook it with the least amount of effort possible. 'Dave Strider’ was _really_ pale, like fifteen-shades-lighter-than-you pale, and lanky as all get out. He wore a pair of sunglasses seemingly glued to his face, and a t shirt emblazoned with a 2d image of an unnerving 3d computer animation. Probably around 5'9 or 10, he had a good 4 inches on you, and seemed to enjoy the fact that you had to tilt your head up to make eye contact with him. Not that you could even see his eyes, behind the shades. He was a textbook douche canoe, as far as you could tell, one of the types at your old school who would throw paper airplanes at the back of your head during exams but never actually went to the trouble of shoving you into the lockers. You had dreamed that maybe, just maybe, you'd have the chance to meet some slightly more refined teenagers if you were attending a boarding school, but the term “refined teenager” was sounding more and more like an oxymoron the longer you tried to find this guy’s eyes through his sunglasses.

“Karkat Vantas,” you responded, forcing an obviously fake chuckle. "You’re going to learn pretty fucking fast that overquoted movie references really don’t impress me.” The dim sunlight and gray-white walls surrounding you were pulling any amount of colour from his face out, leaving him ashen toned. Kind of looks like a zombie, you thought.

He tried again. “You had me at hello?” 

“I never said hello.” You pushed past him, grabbing his bag from where he dumped it in the middle of the room and flinging it onto the threadbare sheets of the top bunk on your bed. "I hit you in the face with a fucking box." You’d already claimed the bottom bunk, and dressed it with a thick black comforter and a striped blue afghan you brought in from your bedroom back at home. “That’s your bed up there. Hope you brought some sort of blanket, because those sheets might as well be tissue paper.”

“Eh, it’s what I’m used to,” he said.

“Your old place must have been indescribably shitty,” you told him. Because as far as prison-esque dormitories go, this one had to be in the national top 3 for 'most accurate recreation of an Alcatraz cell”. That may have been an overstatement, but overstatements were kind of your thing. In all reality the place really was pretty depressing, with beige walls and a dirty cream coloured carpet. The frame of the bunk bed in the corner looked like it had been made by a ninth grader in woodshop, complete with wooden headboards and posts, and the television across from it was tucked into an oak cabinet that looked equally DIY. A desk with an bendy-necked lamp sat next to the doorway, and parallel to it was another door which led to a cupboard sized washroom. Above your head, a 60 watt bulb flickered in someone's grandmother's light fixture.

When you looked back at the doorway, somehow Dave had managed to move from one end of the room to the other in two seconds without you noticing, like he could fucking apparate or something. He was bent over the pile of jewel cased DVDs filling the hallway, picking them up one by one and shoving them back into the box. Also, he was (soundlessly) shaking with laughter. What a jerk off.

“Dude, what is this?” he managed to wheeze out, literally clutching his chest as he did. “Titanic? When Harry Met Sally? I know these are classics, but are you fucking with me?” He couldn't have stood up now if he tried, crouched down with his hair hanging in his eyes and grinning like an idiot. You wondered if he would take well to having another box smashed over his head, maybe one filled with encyclopedias this time. If only assault wouldn't get you expelled.

“I've been told that the pay per view selection here is boring and shitty." It was becoming obvious that you were embarrassed. For fuck's sake, you were even starting to blush. Grabbing the back of your neck with your hand in an attempt to appear nonchalant, you awkwardly spat out, “Jesus, those are good movies, okay? Try not to choke on your own saliva.” 

“Damn, I never thought I'd meet someone with worse taste in movies than John...” He tossed the last couple of cases in the box, straightened up, and handed it off to you. 

“Who the hell is John?" you snapped, trying not to touch him in any way as you took the box. "Your girlfriend?” 

And Dave was laughing uproariously again. "Oh man, you're a riot. No joke.” 

Yeah, you were a joke. To him, at least. Sighing, because you weren't sure what else to do but wanted to have the last word, you left him to try and catch his breath, and began loading your films into the side of the TV cabinet you'd planned on reserving for him.

The same back and forth sarcastic commentary carried on all throughout unpacking, until the room was just about put together. You’d taken up less than a quarter of the closet space with your few pieces of clothing, claimed most of the TV cabinet for your extensive movie collection, and set up a couple of extra lamps throughout the area. You'd had to hide your box of dollar store romance novels under the bed, simply to keep your roommate from making fun of them too. He’d taken all of the surfaces in the bathroom hostage with oddly shaped bottles of hair product, and obscured the welcome mat you laid down in front of the door with fifteen pairs of the same shoe in different colours. All in all, it was a fair trade off, equally split in the most ridiculous and uneven way possible. 

“So is there anything not boring to do around here?” he asked, swinging his legs back and forth over the mattress on your bed. He was already fucking with the boundaries you set, and had stretched himself out across the bottom bunk of the bed, all over your dear blue striped afghan, That was where he had been stationed for the past three minutes, flipping through his phone and mostly ignoring you, despite efforts on your part to move him off. Finally, rather than 'get off of my fucking bed', you'd compromised on 'just don't mess up the covers, or I'll mess up your face. Especially those godawful sunglasses.'

“The hell are you asking me for?” you grumbled. “You aren't the only one who just got here.” You’d occupied yourself temporarily by arranging your DVDs in alphabetical order. You'd been trying out rainbow order back at home, but ultimately found it difficult to organize, not to mention it looked dumb.

“What, you mean you only got here this year?” He sat up a bit, glancing at you as his back squished your pillows into the headboard. His lips formed a thin, contemplative line. “I would have thought you were one of those kids with rich parents who’s been attending this place since grade three.” He raised one eyebrow just above the rim of his sunglasses. 

“Do you ever take those things off?” You slammed the cabinet door shut and flipped around so that you were leaning against it, knees pulled up to your chest. “They make you look like a total dick. Which, I guess, is pretty accurate.” 

“That's what I like to hear. Now answer the question.” His voice was an unwavering monotone.

“Well, there’s no elementary school here to begin with, but yeah, this is my first year. I tried to get in last year, but they rejected me for some bullshit reason like ‘not enough community service’. I just barely snuck in through the waiting list this year.” You crossed your arms against your chest. There was a soft hum coming from the ceiling fan overhead and filling the room, and it sounded disturbingly like the one at your old place. “This school is picky as fuck. How the hell did you manage to get accepted?”

“...well, I'm just gonna ignore the insult there. And now I guess I'm gonna insult you by saying that I applied as a joke." He shrugged. "Guess I’m just that good.” And just to rub salt in the wound, he shuffled around around a bit amongst your bed covers. Now he was just trying to wrinkle them.

A sense of low key fury you couldn't quite describe crept through the back of your mind, and you had bite your tongue to keep from swearing at him, very loudly. Through gritted teeth, you managed a quiet “Are you fucking serious...?” 

The sun was starting to set, and what used to be harsh white light filling the room had turned into a dim glow. You weren't looking at Dave himself anymore, but rather his silhouette against the wall as he sat up, clicked his phone on and off, and then sprung off of the bed. “Let's not dwell on that. There’s supposed to be some kind of meet-and-greet thing starting in five minutes, so if we leave now and walk at about 1 mile per hour, we should arrive just in time to be fashionably late. What do you say?” He grabbed his coat from the wire rack standing in between the door and a wastebasket, and pulled it over his arms. It was a scuffed up red and white varsity jacket, and teamed up with the sunglasses, sculpted hair, and dramatic lighting, he looked so unlike an actual person that you found yourself staring. You wondered what he actually looked like, under the shades.

But he snapped you out of your trance pretty quickly. Literally, snapped. Waving four fingers and clicking his tongue, he looked at you like you were a spaced out three year old. "Earth to Karkat? Are you coming or what?” he asked, and tapped you on the nose. 

At that, you scrambled to your feet and over I where he was standing, grabbing your own jacket off of the back of the desk chair. “Look, babe, I get that I’m the pretty easy on the eyes, but you've got a whole year to admire the Strider. In the meantime we're cutting it close between fashionably late and assholeishly late. Let’s bounce.” 

You followed him out the door. “Where is this thing?” you quipped, taking in a deep breath of humid air as you stepped from the dorm building and into the tiny parking lot out front. The grounds were pretty expansive, and you haven’t seen much more than the inside of your dorm for the past hour or so.

“Hell if I know. I didn’t look at the maps.”


	3. You Wanna Buy Somefin

Although you would never admit to it out loud, you were glad Bro insisted you bring a jacket here. From years of experience, you were under the impression that you'd never need to wear anything heavier than a t shirt while in Houston. But somehow, as if it were contained within an air conditioned bubble, this school managed to be consistently chilly and moist. Completely, completely out of line with the typical Texas hot and dry. You hadn’t seen 53 degrees in a long time. Having something on your arms was a bit of a relief, even if you'd literally never had reason to wear this thing before. It was only worn out because it was one of those 'bringing back grunge' designs, not because you'd spent any significant amount of time wearing it. But now, it let you keep warm and look cool doing it. Suffering for fashion wouldn't be necessary.

A soft breeze blew against your back as you strolled through damp grass of the courtyard. As much as you loved the heat, you found you were kind of enjoying this. Or, would be, if your surroundings fit the weather more like a pine forest than an English lawn. 

Karkat, on the other hand, wasn't adjusting to the temperature well. He had his hands shoved as deep into his pockets as he could fit them, and was wearing a woolen scarf over his jacket, yet he was still talking like he was on the verge of freezing to death. You had tried telling him that the scarf really wouldn't be necessary, but he'd showed you what he thought ahout that by wrapping it so far up his face you could only just see his eyes peeking out from the top edge.

“Dude, you're crazy. 53 is like a fucking Canadian summer. It’s not that cold.” You reached over and gently tugged at the end of the scarf, causing it to unravel one wrap's worth from around his nose.

“Hey, don’t do that!” he cried, and scrambled to collect the end of the wool and reposition it. But unfortunately for him, you still had a latch on it, and started spinning your arm around above his head until the scarf was completely gone from his neck and wrapped around your palm. “Dave, what the shit!” 

You held it just too high for him to reach, and giggled as he grabbed at it. Acting like a schoolyard bully had never been this fun. “This isn’t fucking funny! I'm cold!” Maybe you would have felt bad, if it seemed like Karkat was ever legitimately upset by any of this shit. He had enough dignity to not out and out jump for it, but he was pretty damn close, stumbling around on his tip toes, trying to block your path and pull the scarf out of your hand. Of course, this balancing act only worked for a shocking total of 15 seconds before he lost his footing and fell backwards into the wet grass.

Still laughing under your breath, you ambled over to him, and wondered whether or not you should help him up.

“You mother fuck-“ a long winded rant was forming on the little guy’s lips, but he cut off when he saw you standing over him, arm outstretched. You gave him a sheepish smile. There were grass stains all over his jeans, and the scarf was left lying innocently by your feet. He squinted at you for a moment before propping himself up in the dirt on his elbows. “Hell if I’m letting you help me up when you wouldn’t let me return the fucking favour.” He leaned forward, clearly trying to get back to his feet, but the dew coating the ground proved to be too slippery for such an endeavor and he slid backwards, ending up right where he started.

With a low grumble, he tried again, making it all the way to a sitting position this time. But then, upon transferring to a crouch, his left leg slipped from under him, and he was splayed out face first in front of you once more. Face half obscured amongst the blades of grass, he glared at you. 

Fourth time around, he took a crab walk sort of approach and flipped over onto his back. He raised his torso into the air, in what must have been the most awkward position ever, shifted one foot several inches to the left, and with a loud thump he was down again.

“If you're trying to prevent us from getting there,” you informed him, "it's not gonna work." One last time you took a second to grin down at him before bending over, enclosing both of his arms in a death grip. With a quiet grunt on your part and...unique sound on his, you heaved him to his feet. After a moment, presumably taken to recover from the shock of being lifted off of the ground, he stumbled back and wrenched his arms from your grip. His face was tinged red, and he was baring his teeth at you like an enraged baby animal. He was so angry. And so small. Overall, it was almost adorable. It took a second for you to remember that he was an actual person, not some picture on the Internet, and that you couldn't just stare at him no matter how cute he looked at that moment. That was kind of embarrassing, now that you thought of it. Not wanting to drag the situation out any longer, you pivoted on your heel and took off down the field again.

Karkat, of course, followed behind, stomping his feet into the dirt and cursing at you all the way.

About two minutes later, Karkat exhausted his latest list of complaints about you, and the two of you were enclosed in the shadow of what the brochure called the 'Student Recreational Hub'. The building was probably the largest structure on the lot, and unfittingly modern as far as it's architecture went. You hadn’t noticed it when you drove in. It was made of marbled gray stone, though probably half of it was full walls of windows. There weren't even any roof spires, much to your dismay. Maybe you’d plant some there one of these days.

A flamboyant pop song was booming out of the building, and once you had identified it, you couldn't help but cringe. Leave it to the most pretentious school you’d ever heard of to play electronica remixes of early 2000s Taylor Swift on max volume. It was ironic, sure, but at what cost? A faint grimace now spread across your face, you used one hand to push through the building’s revolving door and into the lobby-esque part of it. A woman sitting at a desk, much more amicable looking than the booth lady from earlier, gave you a small smile and gestured to the large staircase in the center of the room. “If you’re here for the meet and greet, it’s just up there," she said. You gave her a weak salute. 

Karkat must have been lagging back a bit, because you didn't hear him behind you on the stairs as you made your way onto the second floor. But you didn't put too much thought into it. He hadn't been acting to eager to get here, anyways.

The upper part of the building was substantially less uptight and official in decor than the main one. It appeared to be one large room, with squares of couches spread around throughout. Farther down, there was what appeared to be a combination of a kitchen and a bar, and at the far end there was a stage with a podium, surrounded by three circles of foldy chairs. A few hundred students were scattered throughout, talking in small groups and laughing. They actually looked like a pretty colourful crowd.

Except that you didn't know any of them, and you couldn't exactly just walk up to a cluster and barge your way in. It didn't help that Karkat wasn't here yet, either. Maybe you could find the refreshment table, and pull the old 'has anybody spiked the punch yet' routine with whoever was there. Better than nothing. So you made your way over to kitchen area in search of refreshment. 

Right in front of it, there was a long table set up, spread with a gingham table cloth and covered in cans of soda you’d never heard of and sparkling water. It all looked expensive, sure, but other than that the fancy orange crush ripoffs were kind of boring. You gave the cans a quick once over before deciding against all of them, and heading over to the coffee machine behind.

You’d never actually liked coffee, if you were being honest, but something about being hard enough to drink the stuff black had always seemed like a good addition to your cool-kid routine. At least, it had when you were in grade 5, and were only marginally cool by anyone's standards. By now you were pretty sure that if you thought drinking black coffee was badass that just made you a dork, and you knew it didn't actually do anything for your reputation. The most attention anyone ever paid to it was the few questioning looks you got when you forgot to pretend you were enjoying it and came up from a sip gagging or coughing. But even so, it had kind of become a habit. You'd been at it since you were nine years old, back when Bro still tried to lure you away from the espresso machine with Hello Kitty pop tarts and Count Chocula. You’d almost grown to enjoy the bitter aftertaste on the back of your tongue, or the burns you got on the inside of your cheeks. Though you weren't sure if ‘enjoy’ was really an accurate term.

You nearly through filling a Styrofoam cup when a shrill whisper hit your ear and surprised you so much you almost dropped it.

 “Hey, kid."

You set your cup on the counter next to the machine haphazardly, letting some of the liquid slosh over the edge and onto the granite below. A quick glance around you revealed nothing. As far as you could see, you were the only one anywhere near the beverage table. Maybe you were going crazy. One last time you surveyed the area before shrugging and going back to your coffee.

You were dumping in your third packet of sugar when the voice came again. 

“Kid. You with the sunfishes-I mean sunfishes-cod damn it, shades. You deaf? I’m talkin to you.”

So you definitely weren’t hearing things. But no sketchy figures had appeared since you last scanned the beverage table. What the hell.

“Where the fuck are you?” you hissed. Oh god, you probably looked mental. You kept your voice low, and peeked around the back of the coffee machine.

“Over here,” the voice shout-whispered.

“Where the hell is ‘over here’?”

“The window, dumb bass. Look at the window.”

Sure enough, just behind one of the sheer curtains covering the window adjacent to the snack table, you could barely make out someone’s silhouette. A thin, tanned arm stretched out from the cover of the fabric, and with a single finger extended beckoned you over. Slowly, you approached it, and slipped behind the material to finally get a good look at whoever the hell was there.

A teenage girl with narrow, bony shoulders stood in front of you. From her skin tone, she looked to be some sort of Pacific-Islander heritage. Thin, magenta lipsticked mouth stretched into a malicious grin, she was wearing some sort of baggy, knee length trench coat.

“Took ya long enough.” She puckered her lips, glancing over her shoulder for a moment before taking a couple of steps towards you. “...you interested in buying somefin?” She pulled open the right side of her coat to reveal a series of pockets, and displayed them for you. Small labels were scratched above each, but the handwriting was so large and messy you couldn’t make out the words. “I got a whole buncha fresh shit, straight out the labs.”

“Uhh...what?” You leaned in closer to pouches, trying to make out the words on the labels. Did that say ‘torte’? What the hell kind of a drug is that? Sure, maybe you never planned on being the D.A.R.E. poster child, but this seemed...fishy.

She leaned in a little closer, breathing on your face. It made you a bit uncomfortable.  
“Don't be fucking nervous, kid. My shit’s top quality. Reely valuable.” Glancing down for a second, she reached into one of the topmost pockets and pulled out a small slip of paper, clutched in between chipped fuchsia nails.

“The hell is this?” You made a grab for it, but she pulled it just out of your reach before your fingers could close around it.

“Nuh uh." She wiggled a finger at you. "Think of my business like the fucking guppie pond at your little sister’s girl scout shortcake bash. You don’t know what you get till you show me some green.” She held out her other palm, gesturing for you to do so. 

You squinted at her, which of course she couldn't see behind the shades. “Come ooooon,” she whined. “It’ll be a surprise.”

“What the fuck kind of a drug dealer are you?” Not that you were sure what the standard was for drug deals, but this couldn't have been it, could it? The girl let out a loud giggle and shoved you playfully on the shoulder.

“What chu talkin’ bout, son? I ain’t sellin' no weed. Just brownies.” She shoved her hands into the pockets of her trench coat and leaned casually against the wall. "Though if you _were_ fishin for something else, we could probably work that out too." 

“What does that even _mean_?" you demanded. But your inquiry was met with a single cupped palm, thrust in your face. A few gold bracelets jangled off of her bony wrist, and she poked you delicately in the nose with her forefingers.

“I told ya. You need to gimme some dough if you wanna get some dough.”

Your curiosity finally got the better of you, and you grudgingly stuck a hand into the pocket of your jeans. “Jesus,” you muttered, taking out your wallet and flipping through it, “How much do you want?”

A jovial grin spread across the girl’s face, and she clasped her hands together. “How much do you got?”

“Does it matter? I’m not about to spill the contents of my personal fucking bank account just to see whatever you’ve got written on that stupid piece of paper.” There was a total of one bill inside the neon duct tape confines of your wallet, and you were a bit reluctant on the prospect of parting with it. Maybe you could give her that fake dime in the bottom of the change compartment.

“Man, do you want the goods or not?” Her smile drooped, and she started to pout.

“...all I’ve got is a twenty.” You half heartedly extracted the bill from your wallet. Sure, you had some more back in your room. But what the fuck.

Instantaneously, she was grinning again. "That’ll do.” She swiped the money from your fingers the moment it left your wallet and used her other hand to shake yours at the same time. “Meenah Peixes," she informed you." Pleasure doin’ business with ya.” And with that, she flipped around and took off, dashing out from behind the curtain and outside of your line of sight. You thought you heard a distant “see you soon”, but you couldn't really be sure.

The two inch square of paper you'd just paid twenty dollars for was sitting on the table next to your now cold cup of coffee, and for the first time you could actually make out what it said.

Scrawled across in surprisingly neat handwriting, complete with i's that had been dotted with tiny, purple circles, the paper appeared to be a certificate of some sort. Written on it were the words: “You are hereby entitled to one baklava, courtesy of Condescension Kitchens. Thanks for the cash.” Over the writing, there was a faded watermark. On the back, there was a small map of the grounds, with one room circled in bright pink marker.

You weren't sure what to make of the whole ordeal, or what the slip of paper actually meant, but you decided you weren't up to thinking about it at the moment and shoved the certificate into your wallet in place of the twenty dollar bill. Guess you’d have to make another coffee.

...or maybe not. Standing in front of the coffee machine, all crossed arms and a permanent scowl on his face, was Karkat, looking caught between uncomfortable and furious. He hadn't seen you yet.

Decidedly, it was safe to assume given the look on his face that the moment you approached him he would tear your skull from your neck, and then probably stomp on it, too. You just weren’t sure you were ready for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you tell how much I love Meenah? So much.


	4. Arachnophobia

You were going to murder him.

You were going to rip his jugular straight from his pale little throat and wear it around yours like a fucking necklace.

And all that was in your way was this god damned mother fucking cock sucking stupid glass door.

Your face was tightened into such a grimace you can barely see Dave through your narrowed eyes. But you didn't have to see him to know that the douchebag was abandoning you in the one time you actually wanted, no, needed, his help. You stopped pushing the revolving door the moment you saw him turn away from you and prance up the stairs, and instead you started pounding on it. You used all of the strength you could muster. “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU GOING?” you screamed after him. “YOU PIECE OF SHIT! GET THE FUCK BACK HERE AND HELP ME OUT OF THIS FUCKING AIRTIGHT DEATH TRAP!” But apparently, revolving doors were soundproof.

He cleared the top of the stairs, and you inhaled deeply to summon up one last scream. “DAVE STRIDER, IF YOU FUCKING TAKE ONE MORE STEP INTO THAT ROOM, I WILL NOT HESITATE TO GO BACK TO OUR DORM AND PISS ON EVERYTHING YOU OWN.” 

He never turned around.

Your body slackened from all of the force you were using a moment ago, and with tired lungs you let your back fall against the hard glass behind you as you slid down to the floor. Your blood was boiling, but your throat was still raw from all of today's screaming, and you decided it wasn’t worth it to waste your breath when no one was around to listen. The woman at the desk inside, it seemed, had hastily gone ‘on break’ the moment she heard the first few shouts erupt from your compartment in the door, and you swore to yourself the first thing you'd do when you got out was file a complaint about her. That, and find Dave, so you could punch him right in his smug face. 

“Oh my god,” you whispered. The floor around you was dirty; stained with mud from hundreds of shoes that had passed over it. The sheer dirtiness of it made you cringe, and you tried to distract yourself by watching a spider as it crawled across the chipped white tile towards you. It was about the size of your thumb, and it was kind of cute. You leaned over and reached for it with one extended hand, sticking out a few fingers for it to climb onto. The little guy regarded the sudden obstacles in it's path with caution before scurrying up onto them. You brought your hand closer to your face to get a better look at your new friend, but the spider clearly was not in the mood to be admired, and scurried into your jacket sleeve post haste.

“Oh, shit, shit shit shit shit shiiiiiiiiiit!” You couldn't help but shriek. You could feel it's tiny legs travelling across up your arm, so light that they were barely a tickle. Why did you have to wear loose clothing?? You may have liked spiders, but you didn’t like them roaming freely across your body under your clothes. That was enough to freak anyone out, including you. Jumping to your feet, you began grabbing blindly at your back in whatever area you felt the thing move. You were trying to either shake it out, or squish it, or something. Anything that would get it the hell off of you.

It was when you felt a sharp pinch in between your shoulder blades that you finally broke.

“AAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!” You screeched, loudly and without restraint, and with all of the terror and strength you could muster you planted a slap in the location of the pinch. Finally, the crawling sensation came to a halt, and you felt something squelch against the skin of your back. Ugh. At least it was dead now, but...oh fuck. It was wet. You tried to hold back a gag.

Trying to keep the cloth of your t shirt clean of any spider guts, you awkwardly stuck your hand up your and started rubbing at the spot the tiny intruder had met it’s end. It was only when you felt satisfied that your body was efficiently clean of any arachnid limbs, and your hyperventilating had calmed a bit, that you noticed someone outside was staring at you.

There was a tall teenage boy standing just outside of the doors, wearing the brightest and tackiest red sweater you had ever seen. Sporting a messy bedhead of black hair and a mild overbite, he almost looked like you. He was frowning gently, and appeared to be riddled with worry. Shit. Had he been there this whole time?

He lifted one hesitant hand to wave at you, biting his lower lips with concern. “Is everything alright?” he asked, keeping his voice soft.

You wrenched your arm from the back of your shirt and spluttered for a moment, wondering if it would even be possible at this point to give him a dignified response. “No," you started, "I just got stuck, and then there was a spider, and-" God damn, you were so eloquent. He raised his eyebrows at you, and his expression of concern suddenly shifted into one of piqued interest.

He started talking. And then, he just... he didn't stop. “Ah, arachnophobia!" he exclaimed, sounding far more excited than was appropriate.  "Well, such a frenzy is a completely reasonable response to a trigger like a spider. Forgive me for ever even considering that you could have been overreacting. Is the offending arachnid still near you? If you feel that you’re calm enough to communicate your feelings coherently, you and I can work through a few simple steps together to ensure that you can transfer yourself to an area outside of this door, far away from any potentially traumatic creatures. I could even volunteer to do you the duty of exterminating it, so that you could feel safe to enter the building. That is, if you're comfortable with the murder of innocent arthropods."

“What? No, I’m not afraid of spiders, it just-"

“You do not appear to be in a state of unmitigated terror. Now, please do not take my saying that as a dismissal of your phobia. I am simply pointing out that if you were in a calm position from which you could focus less on the fear surely filling you and more on how remove yourself from this situation that you are in, it would be highly convenient. Now, if you feel you are ready to begin, we may initiate a swift and efficient rescue process.”

“Look, I don’t need to be rescued from any fucking spiders, I-"

“It is absolutely imperative to your wellbeing that you complete each of the steps I present you with flawlessly. Now, please do not feel pressured in any way by this. I simply request that you carry out the actions I describe in every instruction without fault, otherwise you will not be able to free yourself from the hellish beast trapped inside of that door with you. I will be glad to offer you personal counsel once you have liberated yourself from the situation you are currently in, during which we may have a long and all encompassing discussion of your phobia. Perhaps we can even hold a comprehensive group brainstorm to gather suggestions for how you can overcome this ordeal.”

“Can you maybe shut up for a moment so we can actually get something done?”

“We will now instigate the operation. Please begin step one: walk out of the door.”

“No, if you actually wanted to listen to me, you’d know that I can’t fucking-"

“Once you have successfully ‘walked out of the door’, as stated in my last instruction, you will have completed to process of removing yourself from the trigerring situation and relocating to a safe place. If you would please do me the honour of informing me of where the arachnid is, I can promptly dispose of it as soon as you have cleared the vicinity of this revolving door. Also, if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to perhaps engage in a debate with you about the rights of insects, and whether or not it is truly morally acceptable to compromise those. You may begin.”

“THE SPIDER IS ALREADY FUCKING DEAD, DIPSHIT.” A scream had been building in your chest ever this guy had started talking, and it felt amazing to finally release it. 

The boy looked taken aback, and raised one slender hand to his mouth in a shock. Maybe you shouldn’t have shouted so loudly. “Look," you tried, "I didn’t mean to offend you, or whatever, but you’re not actually letting me explain the situation.”

He shook his head weakly, closing his eyes and moving his hand up to his forehead. He no longer looked offended, but disappointed. You were beginning to realize that you would rather remain stuck in this door for maybe the rest of your life than be helped out of it by this guy. You wondered if you could revoke your plea for help now. Maybe he would disappear again.

No such luck. He met your glare with a disapproving frown, and opened his mouth to speak once more. Fuck.

“I strongly suggest that you refrain from using any potentially insulting phrases in your speech. While I am not personally _offended_  by such conventions of language, I know all too well that such seemingly casual banter can disturb the public and earn you an undesirable reputation. Not to mention, while more generalized terms, such as what we will politely refer to as ‘the f and s words’, may not be specifically oppressive to any minority groups, throwing around such rude language indiscriminately opens all sorts of doors into the derogatory slurs that set our modern society back by decades.”

“Arrrrrghhhhhh.” You pressed yourself against the wall next to you and banged your head against it. “Either help me get this fucking door unstuck or go the hell away.”

He was saying something again, but you refused to listen. By that point you’d basically resigned yourself to living out your last few days stuck here, listening to this guy’s lectures until you died of thirst, or, if the gods had mercy, found a way to off yourself more quickly. Damn Dave. Damn him to hell. If he hadn’t abandoned you in this door, either you would be out by now, or you wouldn’t be suffering through red sweater’s spiel of faux concern alone. A wave of fury washed over you, and with the last of your rage furled strength you the door one final shove. You’d tried to imagine was not a wall of solid glass you were hitting, but your roommate’s face. Maybe with a couple of broken teeth he wouldn’t be so fucking attractive.

...whoa. What the hell was that? Maybe you'd banged your head on the door somewhere in all of this. 

But the thought was out of your mind in an instant, because as your shoulder collided with the nearest panel of the door, it moved underneath you.

You were free.

You were out. The door was working. You wanted to shout something, and shout it loudly, and probably pepper it with words that would offend your new red sweatered friend. The guy was still standing outside of the building, and if you made it inside there would be an entire revolving door separating the two of you! If you could just make it upstairs and hide somewhere, maybe  he wouldn’t find you. He might even get stuck in the door himself! And when he did, you sure as hell weren’t going to help him out. Without even thinking about it, you let out a giggle, and then immediately tried to cover it up with a cough. You couldn't let him know at any cost. 

Not that he even would have noticed. Your own personal preacher no longer appeared to be paying any attention to you, and was spewing his self-righteous jargon to no one in specific. Carefully, you pushed on the door, as quietly as you could slipped out into the lobby room. The guy didn’t even see you.

Under your breath, you let out a quiet 'fuck yes' and made a mad dash up the stairs. Now that you were liberated from your revolving glass cage, you were free to beat the shit out of Dave. Or, at the very least, scream him deaf.


	5. World's Coolest Niece

You woke up to the sound of a fire alarm.

The suddenness and sheer volume of the noise startled you so badly that you nearly fell out of bed (which would have been disastrous, seeing as you were on the top bunk). Through a still groggy consciousness and drooping eyelids, it took you a few moments to figure out what was going on, but when you did, oh boy did you ever panic.

You made your way down the ladder to the floor as calmly as you could, dropping to your knees the moment your feet hit carpeted ground, and began dragging yourself towards the exit. You didn’t smell any smoke, but in the half dreaming state you were in you couldn’t really say anything for sure. For all you knew, the alarms were going off because some idiot had been smoking in their dorm room. But who would have been lighting up at 5 am? All you could be sure of was that you needed to get out. Feeling your nose bump against the wall at the end of the room, you groped across the wallpaper with one hand until you felt the surface of the door under your fingertips. It was cool to the touch. You made a grab for the handle, but in your tired stupor missed and crashed face first into the wall next to you. For a second try, you pulled yourself off of the ground, got a good grip on the door handle, and pushed it open, collapsing after it into the hallway.

By this point, you had woken up a bit, and were now awake and alert enough to notice that you couldn’t hear the alarm anymore. Had it shut off? Did fire alarms even do that? Nobody else in the hallway was stirring, so, confused, you made your way back to the room.

It was as you were climbing back up the ladder to return to the warm confines of your bed that the alarm sounded again. Welp. There was no way in hell you were going to get any more sleep after this.

Though this time you noticed something about it. Rather than panicking and running for the door again, you actually stopped to listen to for a moment. Now that your brain was active and fully conscious, you noticed that the sound was less of the shrieking siren you were familiar with and more of a kind of dull, high pitched electronic tone. And it seemed to be coming from your roommate’s headboard. A weak glow was coming from what must have been his cell phone, and the closer you got the louder the noise became.

It sure was an alarm, alright. Not a fire alarm, but an alarm clock.

You scrambled for the thing, eager to turn it off. This was why you didn’t use alarm clocks. No matter what the tone, no matter how loud or how quiet, they scared the living shit out of you. That being said, this was probably a result of all of the times your brother woke you up as a kid with surprise strifes. After so many unpleasant mornings like those from your childhood, you had come to fear anything that pulled you out of your slumber, as though your psyche just  assumed whatever was demanding you get out of bed would also be holding a sword.

You violently jammed your thumb against the ‘dismiss’ button, and the obnoxious noise shut off. Thank God. No way in hell were you letting your roommate keep that for the entire semester. Despite the racket made by the alarm, miraculously Karkat was still asleep. Laughing quietly, you planted yourself on the edge of the bottom bunk, next to his feet. What if it had been a real fire alarm? Would he have slept through that, too?

Your attention now turned on Karkat, you gave him a quick one over, and oh my god did he ever look cute like this.

He was tangled up in three different blankets at once, and suddenly you knew where your sheets had disappeared to halfway through the night. They were right there, wrapped around his feet. And he was berating you earlier for not respecting who’s things were who’s. Not that you minded, exactly.

There were strands of black hair falling across his face, but the early morning sunlight rendered them in a reddish brunette sort of hue. His right hand was balled into a fist and squished against his cheek, his left lying relaxed across his chest. For once, he didn’t look annoyed. Though you hadn’t known him for even 24 hours, you hadn’t seen much else from him than excessive shouting and unpleasant scowls. Still adorable. But this was a different kind of adorable. When he was mad, he kind of looked like a puffer fish; tiny but all blown up with big cheeks. But this, this was a nice change of pace.

This was creepy as fuck. Wow, he had really long eyelashes.

But before he had the chance to wake up and be scared shitless by the fact that his new roommate was leaning over him, watching him sleep, the common sense part of your brain turned on and you realized that this was probably not the best way to build a friendship. And God, you realized now with how badly the sun was blinding you that you hadn't even put on your shades on yet. All the more reason to get the fuck out of there before Karkat woke up. You made a hasty attempt to stand, but failed to remember that you were sitting on the bottom half of a bunk bed. Like the fucking idiot that you were, yousmashed your forehead against the wooden beams of the top bunk, and the impact sent you flying backwards and landing across your roommate’s sleeping form.

His eyes flew open, and the following few seconds were a frenzy of flailing limbs and confused shouting, all overthrown by the throbbing pain in your head.

The two of you somehow both ended up on the floor, and your bedding was still wrapped in knots around Karkat’s feet. He scooted back across the ground as far away from you as he could, a bewildered expression painted on his face.

“Dave?!” He didn’t understand what had just happened any more than you did. You gave him a brief, embarrassed nod, before moaning again as a bolt of pain shot through your temples.

“Morning," you grumbled. You got up and left for the small in-room bathroom in search of some sort of painkiller, leaving Karkat lying discombobulated against the television cabinet.

Neither of you spoke of the incident as you went about your morning rituals. It was pretty obvious that he had no idea what exactly had gone on or why he had woken up on the ground or why the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was your back hurtling towards his face, but it was also pretty obvious that he was in no hurry for you to explain it. As you had basically expected, morning was not the best time to be around Karkat. He had gulped down three cups of instant coffee, complete with a few packets of whitener smuggled out of the meet-and-greet last night, and still looked half asleep. Not to mention his foul mood was worse by a tenfold. You were starting to get used to his unending grouchiness, but it still was a bit unsettling when he was eyeing you skeptically at 6:30 am through half lidded eyes over a mug reading “World’s Coolest Niece”.

The prescheduled breakfast in the dining hall was set to begin in five minutes when he finally forced you away from the bathroom mirror and out of the door. You tried to protest, but to no avail, and in the end had pulled out your phone to see if you could use it's tiny camera to look at your reflection. You managed to reposition a few hairs, but as a strong gust of wind blew across the courtyard and took your perfectly groomed hairdo with it, you realised that this was a pointless endeavour. Not to mention difficult. Personal grooming wasn’t all that easy when you were being pulled across slippery, bumpy ground by a small boy with a bear-trap grip around your dominant hand.

“Duuude," you whined aimlessly at him, and made a frail attempt to pull your arm from the circulation-severing grip of his thin fingers. “I can walk for myself. You know that, right?”

He just narrowed his eyes in response, and picked up his pace. “If I were to let go of you right now, you’d fucking skip right back to the dorm and spend the day French kissing your reflection.”

“What would you care if I did?”

You pulled on his arm again, and he spun around in his tracks. Cheeks tinged red from the cold and furrowed eyebrows, for some reason this comment has thrown him off balance. He opened his mouth an inch, as though to retort to something, but then shut it again. You felt your arm drop to your side, and watched, bewildered, as he wordlessly turned around ambled off down the field again.


	6. Economics of the Home

Of all the timetable fillers Administration could have possibly chosen for you, of course they had to pick Home Ec.

Minor bits of bad luck like this came your way pretty regularly, large enough to bug you but small enough in the scale of things that you couldn't complain about them without sounding like you were whining. After 15 years of the same shit, you had eventually resigned yourself to a lifetime of nothing going the way you wanted it to, ever. And because that phenomenon had just grown ever since you got to this school, you were feeling even more hopeless about life than usual. From getting stuck in a door to spending half an hour listening to a preacher-in-training give sermon without escape to being planted with the most uptight asshole of a roommate ever and still not being able to decide whether you were more repulsed by him or, god knew why, attracted to him...you could say the semester was off to a pretty rocky start.

That was why it didn’t come as a surprise when your fourth period history teacher asked you to head to the Administration office after class ended; and the people there proceeded to explain that due to a timetable mix up your Programming 101 class was now switched to Home Economics 10. You were literally so unsurprised by this that you weren't even compelled to swear at the news. Sure, it did you emotions an injustice to bottle all of your disappointment into a simple grunt and a scowl, but that was better than being sent to the Headmaster for spouting an uncontrollable stream of profanity. Maybe you could just take it out later on poor innocent and undeserving asshole Dave, or just fuck up someone's soufflé to express your rage while they weren't watching.

Due to the hold up of switching your classes, you ended up walking in!fifteen minutes late, and your fantasies of destroying French desserts were quickly crushed as you took in the number of sewing machines spread out across the room. No, okay, you could...you could hold this in. You wouldn't scream.

Sewing was pretty much the reason you despised Home Economics so terribly. You could handle baking a few apple crumbles or taco salads or whatever, even if you consistently burnt them. But sewing? You couldn’t stand it. Spending half an hour trying to position a tiny piece of thread amongst fifty different gears and sewing contraptions in the machines irked you to no end, and you couldn’t count the number of times you'd crucified your fingers with needles in your class last year.

Yes, you'd voluntarily taken a home ec class last year, after your friend Kanaya had badgered you about it for months. Now, Kanaya had over ten years of seeing experience, and was already way too good to be taking a grade 9 class on it. However, she'd promised that if you signed up for the class, she would as well, and she could be there to guide you through every thread strung and seam tightened. Basically, she told you, she wanted you to know how to fix your own shirts, so you could stop begging her to do it for you. It was logical reasoning on her part, but it as it turned out, neither of you were suited to a freshman year class: she was getting a bachelor's degree in Needle and Thread Arts, and you had the skill level of an inexperienced grade 3.

Oh, dear, sweet Kanaya. How you missed her. She had texted you a few words of rambling reassurance on the drive over, but you hadn’t heard from her since. In the...less than one day time span. Okay, so you were a little clingy. She probably would have fit in at a place like this, you thought, a lot better than you did. It would have been nice to have any of your friends here. Moreso, it would mean you wouldn’t be stuck talking to Dave the prodigal jackass all of the time.

Speak of the devil. What more did you need at that very moment than to see his arrogant smirk and shoddy sunglasses staring you down from across the room? Like this day could get any better.

He was frantically gesturing to the empty seat next to him, and it was only then that you realised how long you had been standing in the doorway of the classroom, spacing out completely.

You considered sitting with somebody else, just to spite him and leave him alone in the back of the room, but after a quick look around the class it seemed that the only available seat in the circle of desks was next to him. At least it meant he hadn't suddenly gotten popular throughout the day; though technically you already knew this, as he shared almost every class with you other than math. You slung your backpack off of one shoulder, resisting any feelings of embarrassment, and made your way over to his table.

“Ooo, Karkat," he said, wincing, and trying to look at something behind you. "Aaah. This is awkward. See, I was actually waving at that chick who came in after you..."

“Fuck you,” you grumbled, and dropped your backpack onto the ground under your table. “I didn’t even know I was going to be in fucking housewife lessons until five minutes ago.”

“Housewife lessons?” He gave you an offensively sweet smile. "So you're more used to being the man of the house, huh? Well, then. How about I make you dinner when we get home. Would you like the chicken Alfredo or the pot roast, honey?"

"Your head on a platter, maybe." Trying not to look at him, you glanced around the room.

There were fifteen tables in total, each home to two chairs and sewing machines, and they were set up in two small rows facing a whiteboard and a large table at the front of the classroom. A tall, thin woman stood at the front of the room, and seemed to be glaring at you. Her hair was up in a tight bun, and she was wearing a school blazer. Now that you noticed it, so was Dave... along with every other student in the classroom. Excluding you, of course.

“Am I supposed to be wearing one of those?" you whispered, and he sniggered.

“We were supposed to pick them up at the end of the assembly this morning. I’m guessing you didn’t do that.”

You pulled at the hem of your t-shirt with both hands and gave him an exasperated glare. “Does it look like I fucking did, dumbass? Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

“Damn, your teachers must be pretty slack to not have noticed.”

You jabbed him on the shoulder with your elbow so harshly that he almost tumbled off of his stool. Whoops. “We have the same fucking teachers!” you shouted.

“Whatever. Take mine.” His hands dropped to his chest, and he hastily undid the buttons on the front of his coat. It fell off of his shoulders with a small shrug, and he shoved it into your lap. “They’re not gonna care if I’m not wearing the jacket, but chances are madam austere over there is gonna to have something say about your casual Friday.” Your mouth fell open in protest, but you quickly decided against it as you noticed your Home Ec teacher still glaring from across the classroom.

“Fine.” You pinched your lips together and pulled the blazer over your shoulders, though you had difficulty finding the arm holes. Overall it was about two sizes too big, and fit loosely, but all of your clothes did that. “Damn, how fat are you?" you decided to complain anyways. "This fits me like a fucking poncho.”

“Don’t hate just because you’re fun-sized.”

“What-"

“Class.” A loud rapping of wood against chalkboard came from the front of the room, and the teacher cleared her throat. She had stopped glaring at you specifically, and started glaring at the class as a whole, and you breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe the jacket had helped. She scribbled something on the board, and started into a long and boring introduction, and you let your chin rest on the surface of the table.

You only caught enough snippets of speech from the next half an hour’s lengthy rhetoric on the basics of sewing to know that the teacher was trying to explain, in the blandest way possible, how to thread a sewing machine and correctly follow a pattern. She seemed to be trying to use the most complicated language possible, and with a few glances around the room it became clear that the other students were just as confused by her as you. Last night had been a long and mostly sleepless one, and by this point of the day you were beginning to crash from the morning’s coffee overload. You didn’t quite fall asleep, but you spent most of the class in a hazy half-daydream, in which you had no idea what was going on around you. It was only about half an hour later, when a soft voice hit your ear and you felt someone’s hand ruffle your hair a bit, that you snapped out of it.

“Hey, sleeping beauty. Are you dead?"

“Wha...” You sat up slowly, squinting in the white light that was flooding the classroom. How long had you been out? “Fuck, was I asleep? What did I miss?”

Dave smiled down into his sewing machine. “Nothing much. Teacher spent the last five minutes explaining the thrilling epic of how she and her husband encountered legal problems with their divorce.” He was pushing a few small pieces of fabric under the needle –oh god, the fucking needle- and  he looked to be shockingly deep in concentration.  
“What are we supposed to be making?” you asked.

He nodded to the table in the middle of the room. “Pot holders. They’ve got patterns and material and stuff up there.”

The table’s surface was no longer visible for all of the dull, gray fabrics covering it. A thick pile of papers, illustrated with shapes and instructions you didn’t understand was neatly stacked in the corner. You leafed through them for a moment, and, realizing that all of the papers had the same design, grabbed one. Then, selecting a random swatch of gray for the pile, you made your way back to your machine. For the first time, you actually looked at what Dave was sewing, and...woah. What was that?

“Is that supposed to be a fucking ladybug?”

He didn't glance up from his work. “Hell no. Clearly it’s a piranha.”

“...oh.” You settled back onto your stool, draping the gray sheet over the edge of the desk and eyeballing his machine. His fingers moved quickly, with a strange sort of poise as he inched the fabric back and forth under the needle. He had a few different shades of grey cloth going on in whatever the hell that design was, and it actually looked pretty good. “Doesn’t look much like a piranha," you told him. 

He snickered. “That’s because it’s a ladybug.”

“I thought we were supposed to be making them in these weird rounded square shapes.”

He shrugged. “Eh. Squares are boring.”

By the time the remaining twenty minutes of class were over, you had managed to make...well, something.

If a piece of grey spandex stapled to a square of foam counted as a pot holder, then yes, you had made a pot holder.

However, judging from the disgusted look your teacher shot you as she passed by your table, she thought otherwise. You had no hopes of receiving a good mark.

Dave, on the other hand, had apparently created a masterpiece. His final product had been some kind of depressed looking gray bug creature, complete with swirly hand sewn designs patterning it’s back. Your teacher had dropped her cold-hearted act temporarily upon seeing it and had proceeded to fawn over the thing for three minutes straight. Dave seemed surprised. Apparently, as he explained, his brother spent a lot of his spare time sewing puppets, and Dave had picked up a few tricks over the years. Weird story, maybe, as he excitedly relayed it to you on your way out of class, but he seemed to be enjoying telling it. Honestly, you were just enjoying hearing his voice raised out of it’s typical monotone.

As the both of you made your way across the quad, back towards your dorm, you realized you still had his jacket on. “Hey, do you want this back...?” you asked. You pulled it over your head and attempted to jostle it into his arms.

“You’re the one wearing the fucking t-shirt. Take it for now.” He threw the coat over his shoulder back at you. It landed on the ground next to your feet, and you stooped down to pick it up. Great. Now it was probably covered in grass stains too.

“Hey, I think that’s the campus store or something," he said, and pointed at something off on your right. As the two of you passed by a wing off of the main administration building, Dave suddenly made an abrupt U-Turn and headed back towards it. This specific offshoot of the building had large, rectangular windows surrounding it’s perimeter, and from where you were standing you could make out the outlines of shirts hanging on the walls. “We should stop in and grab your uniform.”

He picked up his pace, striding towards the door on the west side of the room, and you broke into a light jog to catch up with him. A small bell jangled overhead as he pushed the glass door open, and the two of you stepped inside.

You were hit with a strong antiseptic smell the moment you stepped in, and you were quick to realize why, because damn was the place ever clean. Rows of shirts and pants were lined up perfectly along sparkling windows, and neat stacks of merchandise sat everywhere on perfectly polished wooden tables and displays.  
Dave made his way over to the counter and began to speak for you. “Hey,” he said, giving the man tending the till a charming smile. “My buddy over here missed the uniform collection this morning. Think we could pick one up now?”

The man stared over at you through narrowed eyes as you knocked over one of the piles of books. “Yes, that would be possible," he said. His voice was a low pitched drawl, and was just about as dull as everything else at this damned school. “What is his name?” Dave opened his mouth to respond, but the attendent shook his head. “I’m sure he can tell me himself.”

This was probably just the guy's way of preventing you from messing up his piles any further, but you walked over to the cash register and stood beside Dave nonetheless. A plastic tray of lip balms were  set up next to the till, and you casually reached into it and began to pull the tubes out and stack them like dominoes across the counter. “Karkat Vantas.”

“You’re probably looking for an extra extra small,” Dave called out as the man disappeared into a room behind the counter.

You responded with an elbow to his ribs. And strangely enough, you felt kind of affectionate about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, patient friends. The shipping storm has arrived.


	7. Sleepless in Seattle

You had known Karkat for fourteen days when you discovered the reason behind the dark semicircles ringing his eyes.

Now, it had always been fairly obvious that they were caused by a (rather profuse) lack of sleep, but he'd never so much as commented on them, so you couldn't do more than speculate. You could ask, sure, but knowing Karkat he'd just take it as an insult and rip your head off without answering. Like he usually did. While you did admit it was entertaining to watch him get all riled up at times, it made it extremely difficult to actually communicate with him past back and forth sarcasms and jibes.

Because of that, you figured out most of the things you knew about him through observances of his body language and habits. Little quirks, like how he smuggled Chinese takeout onto the grounds past boarding school security on Thursday nights, or the pictures he kept sticky-tacked to the wall above his bed of his old friends, or how he made sure his movie cabinet was immaculately arranged, yet let the rest of the room go to hell and back in terms of cleanliness. The way he would clench his eyebrows together when he was deep in thought, or the cute kind of rounded shape his shoulders made, or the pinkish tinge just faintly behind his cheeks-

Well. Your train of thought had certainly derailed, and had done so pretty quickly at that. This had been happening more and more often lately, and...well. You knew where this was going. You just weren't happy about it. You really, really hated having crushes. The whole process was messy and obsessive and never ended well, and all in all you were happier when you weren't interested in anybody. So for now, you were trying to play it off to yourself as just...finding him interesting. Not that it helped you believe it, exactly, to just openly acknowledge what was actually going on like this. 

It was 11:00 pm on a Friday night, more specifically, the Friday night ushering the beginning of your second weekend at Santa Rayar, and once again you were overthinking your roommate’s personality traits. Maybe it was time to call it a night.

You typed out a quick goodbye to John, who had been pestering you at the time, not-so-regrettably cutting off an in depth analysis of subliminal Faustian tones in “Trumpet of the Swan”. You misspelled about three words as you went, but didn’t really care to correct them. It was late, and your brain was fucking fried. Nothing sounded more appealing than sleep. Karkat was already snoring lightly from underneath you -once again, you still honestly had no idea why he always looked so tired, the kid went to bed at ten o’clock daily-, and you hoped you could, for once, avoid flinging your covers off inadvertently in the middle of the night. The pillow under your head looked warm, and inviting, and you let yourself sink into it’s plushy comfort with a content sigh. Your eyelids were already heavy on your face. It looked like tonight, for once, you might get some solid rest.

But that was too much to ask for. Some unspecified amount of time later, you couldn't be sure how long you had been asleep for, you just knew that you weren’t anymore.

You groaned quietly and rolled over onto your back, peeling your cheek from the fabric of your pillowcase. Small dents in your flesh lined your face from the seam pattern on the sheet. The room felt oddly humid. Of course, the only time this place wasn't Russia-in-July cold was at night, because that made _perfect_ sense. Your skin was damp from the heat, and the thin fabric of the grey wifebeater you had on was stuck to your chest, so you pulled it off and discarded it off the edge of the bunk.

You spent a few minutes staring blankly at the ceiling above your nose, letting thoughts about how uncomfortable you were file mindlessly through your head. Then, when analysis of the plaster grew boring, you instead turned your attention to the floor.

A faint glow was coming from somewhere below you, and only now did you notice the near silent voices drifting across the carpet. For a split second it was almost frightening, until you realized that the light and the noise were both coming from the television. From your vantage point, you could only see a thin sliver of the screen, but if you adjusted your position slightly you could make out a couple of faces floating around. Assuming you weren't in a scene from any number of poltergeist movies and it had turned on by itself, it must have meant that Karkat was awake. You stopped moving around for a moment, instead focusing on the noises filling the air around you. Surely enough, there was a lot more rustling and moving and plastic-y crinkling than would be expected of a kid who was knocked out as cold as he was earlier.

Taking care to make as little noise as possible, you slowly sat up in the bed and began climbing down to the floor. You didn’t expect Karkat not to notice you. After all, the very ladder you were climbing was basically right in front of him. But it was night, and the silence seemed appropriate.

And notice you he did. You hadn’t seen him yet, but the moment you began descending the bed’s small, unstable ladder, you heard an irked sort of grunt and a few muttered curses beneath you. Clearly your intrusion upon his midnight media session was not welcome. Or, at least, that was what he wanted you to think. Sock feet dropping to the floor almost noiselessly, you didn’t bother to look at the screen of the television, but rather settled against the wall next to it and focused your eyes on your roommate instead.

Karkat had immersed himself in a cave of blankets and pillows, with a comforter pulled up to his chin and cushions surrounding him like walls to a tiny, warm fortress. He had his knees hugged to his chest, and a family size bag of Swedish fish sat in front of his feet. He knew you were there, obviously, but he wasn't looking at you, and you couldn't tell if it was on purpose or not. He just kept watching the TV. Maybe he really was this immersed in...whatever the fuck he was watching. 

You stood for a few seconds, staring at the floor because it didn't seem appropriate to make eye contact if he so intentionally wasn't. Maybe it would be best here to just climb back up to your bunk, fall asleep again, and not so much as mention it in the morning. But while your brain said that was the wise and platonic friend thing to do, a different source of judgement insisted that he looked really nice in this lighting, and you wanted to see him from closer up.

He stayed quiet as you climbed over the mountain of blankets and sunk into the mattress next to him. You didn't even have to be under the covers to feel to body heat radiating from him, combined with the warmth of the room, and without even thinking you let yourself slide down against the nearest comforter, back to the wall. Damn, this was comfortable. For some reason, the fact that he still wasn't looking at you made you want to lean in closer, maybe just so that he would have to.

But for now, you were curious to know what he was watching. It looked like a rom com from the 90s, and knowing Karkat that was spot on. Probably one of the movies he'd dropped on your head when you first met him, even. Probably something you'd watch back at home, all torrented and pretty in 720p, just to be ironic about it. Speaking of irony, you weren't even wearing your sunglasses right now. That was...odd, but you didn't let yourself think about it too much. It was late. It was late, and you didn't care. Besides, Karkat was probably dying to see what you looked like under the glasses. Now, if he'd just look at you, he could.

“What’re you watching?” you asked him, and for some reason leaned in so much to do so that your lips were an inch away from his ear. Your voice was dull and low, because if you didn't keep it that way you were worried he'd hear something else in it. Weakly, you nodded at the screen. On it was a woman in old clothing, standing in an office yelling a few choice words at somebody you didn’t care to listen to. But Karkat, though with tired eyes, looked on intently, as though his very life hung on every shrill word to come out of Character A’s mouth.

He pursed his lips, reluctant to answer. “Sleepless in Seattle.”

“Oh.”

No, okay, you couldn't stand this six degrees of separation bullshit, when you knew you were only a few blankets away from actually touching him. It wasn't like you were cold, considering the temperature of this room, but that's what you told yourself anyways as you pulled one, and then two comforters away from him and then partially over yourself. He didn’t seem to try and stop you. After all, he had enough that he could probably spare a couple. There were still one or two comforters between you, not to mention a wall of pillows, so you started pulling those away too. He must have gotten what you were doing here, right? But he didn't ask any questions.

“So how often do you do Midnight Romcom Mania?”

He snorted, lips curling up into an indignant sort of grin. “Nightly.”

This was...it was the same sort of dynamic as a trip to the dentist's, where you made conversation merely as a formality. What you were saying didn't actually have anything to do with what was going on. If anything, you were trying to distract him, maybe.

You pulled the last blanket up from his side, and with all of the pillows out of the way now crawled in next to him. Then, very carefully, like fitting together a puzzle, you arranged yourself beside him, matching his position as best as you could. Your knee bumped against his, your arm pressed into his, and you were kind of glad you'd taken off your shirt earlier because part of your torso was pressing into him in a way that was totally, really nice. God, he was so warm. You moved your arm a few times, pretending to be readjusting your position, but really it was just because you wanted to feel his there next to you. Beside you, you could hear his breathing pick up with the skin contact, which was...yeah, that was hot, okay, he was into this, okay. He was into this? Damn. He was-

He was half asleep. Of all the things you were anticipating he might do in the next moment, from kiss you to grow green with fury and turn into the fucking hulk, he did something you weren't predicting at all, and leaned his head down into your shoulder. It was disarmingly innocent. His hair brushed against your neck, and with a yawn he kind of nuzzled in. Here you were getting all hot and bothered, and what Karkat actually wanted to do was cuddle. That... was fucking adorable. It might have been even more adorable if you didn't have half a hard on at the time. 

You piled a few of the comforters into your lap. Well. You could just ignore that for now.

Seattle still wasn't sleeping, but you weren't watching the screen very intently. Instead, you watched Karkat. It wasn't very often that he let you get this close to him, and you didn't want to waste the opportunity. So you just sat there, inspecting his features. The round tip of his nose, his eyelashes fluttering against each other as he blinked, and his gradually drooping eyelids as he grew closer and closer to being asleep. You let your arm find its way around his shoulders, and gently pulled him in to your chest, and he went without saying anything.

You stayed like that for a few minutes, until you started hearing a soft snoring from under you, and it became clear that he had fallen asleep. But what were you supposed to do now, just go back to your bunk? No way. Now feeling a lot calmer than earlier, you let your own head fall to the side against his, and you leaned back into the wall. Gradually, the voices on the TV started to fade, and the room went out of focus. This was nice. Really nice. Eyelids falling shut, you drifted back to sleep.


	8. Shades and Crabcakes

To be straightforward, like you didn't like being, you hated Halloween.

Maybe it was just due to your cowardice as a child. Back in the elementary school years, anything that went ‘bump’, ‘tick’, ‘scratch’, ‘creak’ or otherwise in the night tended to scare the living shit out of you. The dark, heights, snakes, spiders, clowns, scary movies, student loans, the afterlife, loneliness, just about every commonplace fear amongst children and adults alike had afflicted you at one point or another between kindergarten and grade 6. You had spent four years of your childhood in personal counseling for both your rational and irrational fears, and still came out of it the most pathetic snivelling wimp you could possibly be. In time you had matured out of your debiliating fear, but every now and then something you saw or thought of or experienced would still bring back memories of the consistent terror you lived in as a child.

So, understandably, for a kid with such detrimental fear problems as yourself Halloween was far more dreadful than it was fun. The older kids would always have the most gruesome looking masks on, and back in the day those cheesy electronic skeletons which would light up and rattle whenever someone passed by the porch they were nailed to were the stuff of nightmares. You used to beg your father to forfeit the holiday, to let you stay in on Halloween night, to stop decorating the house with frightening imagery. By the time you were in grade 5 or so, kindergarten age whining of “but daaaaaaad” had transformed into strongly worded persuasive letters, printed in caps lock on his best stationary and tacked with a magnet to the fridge. You couldn't even remember the number of times he'd dragged you to haunted houses under the false pretense of 'dentist appointments"'.

But your father was one of those 'throw the kid in the lake to teach him to swim' guys. He just kind of assumed that filling the house with shit you found terrifying would desensitize you rather than scare you senseless. He had only agreed to your personal counseling on the recommendation of your teacher in the fifth grade, and while you didn’t exactly like the fact that up until this year you had had weekly visits with the shrink, you surely liked her approach much better than his.

Thanks to your father’s love of Halloween, after several years of plastic skeletons hanging in your closet or rubber limbs sticking out from under your bed, Halloween and the time of year that came with it became a period that you dreaded. 

Over time, as you found more and more rubber skeletons in your closet or torn vinyl limbs sticking out from under your bed, you came to dread Halloween. October 31st wasn't a fun night during which you consumed your bodyweight in candy and puked it up five hours later, it was the pinnacle of your seasonal terror. Get past one night of costumed candy collection and you were home free, no more Halloween for another year. Also, getting past Halloween meant that Christmas was coming up. You liked Christmas, for the most part.

You were over most of that, kind of. At least last year your father finally decided you were old enough to know that you didn’t want to go trick or treating. But regardless, the entire season was still one large conglomerate of bitter memories and regulatory holiday themed camaraderie you wished you didn’t have to hear about.

Let alone take part in. 

You had expected as much from the boarding school. Most education systems seemed to jump on the chance to get kids excited about things, and if they could incorporate learning into the mix well then that was just fantastic. Though frankly, you had your doubts about the educational value of the paper pumpkins they forced you to cut out in grade two, or the terribly decorated Halloween dances with shitty pop soundtracks of grade 6, or the badly put together Halloween pep rallies of grade 9. Compared to the mandatory trainwrecks you were used to going through at the end of October, a small Halloween party organized by the student council at a local bowling alley sounded heavenly, especially considering that attendance was optional. You had fully intended to spend this October 31st in the comfort of your dorm with your homework and some music, pretending the holiday was not taking place. Maybe you would even take a stroll down to the library. You assumed what with the party going on, it should have been pretty empty.

But as per usual, you weren’t about to get off that easy. Fate was not so friendly to you, and this time the catalyst for disaster was your ever wonderful roommate, one Dave Strider. He was becoming the sole cause of your problems more and more frequently the longer you had known him for, and the fact that it was he who was preventing you from forgetting Halloween was actually a thing irked beyond expression.

It was the day of the event, several hours before it was set to begin, that he had come to you with a question as fake-innocently phrased as ‘will you be wearing a costume?’. You were pretty sure he was just fucking with you, as you had made it clear over the last couple of days that you had no intentions of going to the thing at all, let alone be dressing up. You had told him exactly that, albeit in a considerably larger word count, but he persisted, explaining to you all of the various ways it would be fun and how it wouldn’t even be too Halloween themed if you just stuck to the bowling and why you shouldn’t leave him alone to be attacked by the seniors. That last point you could relate to all too well – that group had to have some of the strangest and most aggravating people you had ever met- but it was only when he promised that he would make both of your beds for the next three weeks for morning checkup that you conceded to his demands. After all, trying to perfectly arrange your covers across your mattress was unexpectedly difficult, and the barter sounded fair enough.

Though honestly, the offer wasn’t really necessary. You had basically surrendered the moment he suggested it, and only kept up the refusal to see if you could get something out of him. Going anywhere with Dave was generally fun, and if it had to be a badly put together Halloween party at a bowling alley then so be it. You were trying to establish some sort of friendship with him, you really were. After the morning you had woken up to find him in the bottom bunk with you, holding you up to his body in a sleeping death grip with both of his arms, and the subsequent freakout on your part which followed, you'd been consistently worried that you were on awkward terms with him. He didn’t seem to think so, and honestly you didn’t either, but you still automatically felt the need to make sure that everything between the two of you was completely, 100% comfortable.

That was how you found yourself standing outside of Ray’s Bowlorama in a five year old felt dinosaur costume, ready and prepared to give your all in celebrating the very holiday you hated.

The costume, to explain a bit, belonged to Dave. It was a left over from his grade 5 year, and he had apparentlykept it and brought it along for ironic purposes he would not reveal to you. The fabric was itchy against your skin, and it smelled faintly of moth balls, but it was better than nothing.

Dave stood next to you as you walked in the neon lit doors of the building, sporting a considerably less elaborate costume than yours, if you could even call what he was wearing a costume. The extent of his dressing was a pair of what were apparently llama ears sticking up from his head, and a few black whiskers drawn across his cheeks in washable Crayola marker. It was entirely like the sort of costumes the girls at your old school would wear, save for the fact that Dave’s ironically paired red dress shirt and scuffed up jeans were not slutty aside from the fact that he was the one wearing them. You were assuming such costumes were where he got the inspiration for this one from. You had tried to tell him over and over again as he got ready that llamas did not have whiskers, but he had simply laughed and said for the thousandth time that he knew.

Loud pop music was pulsing from inside the building, and you decided as you took it in that this was the exact same music used at the meet-and-greet, and that the student council only had one playlist........... 

{ahem: author's note. If you don't have spotify, then [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZmVmhcCc-U) is all you need to know.}

You had done your best to avoid said student council for as long as possible, especially after your run in with one of it’s members in a certain incident with a revolving door, but for a moment you considered filing a written complaint to them. A strongly worded one, of course.

The bowling alley itself looked like a bit of a dump from the inside, and some sort of decorations committee had clearly tried to make up for that by filling the place with as many colourful spotlights and lasers as possible. For a small scale school organized party, this was a bit excessive, to say the least. The bowling lanes were scattered about the room, and while most appeared to be filled with various pairs and teams of students, you and Dave managed to find an empty one down at the end. You were the only person there who was fully in costume, and you couldn’t help but feel just the slightest bit silly. You expressed your concerns to Dave, and he responded by pointing out the various costumes of the student council, who appeared to have already started their own game of bowling. Using them as reassurance, sincere or not, did not help you to regain any of your dignity.

The party seemed to be nothing more than a night of free, unorganized bowling games, and after waiting in your lane for further instruction for about fifteen minutes, you and Dave finally concurred that there would be none and struck up your own game.

You went under the creative names of “Shades” and “Crabcakes” on the score monitors, and set into a string of cutthroat, win or die competitive bowling matches. By the sounds of things, the other students had done the same. The clatter of heavy balls against smooth wooden lanes filled the hall with noise, and quiet chatter came from all around you. Halloween wasn’t mentioned even once, past the fabric witch hanging on the entryway of the building.

Dave turned out to be a pretty shitty bowler. While he may have talked the talk, pumping himself up in every sport known to man, he didn’t seem to actually have a clue how to bowl. On his first turn he had held the ball directly above the gutter and dropped it in, and on the second turn he subsequently managed to drop the thing on your toes when you tried to show him that you don’t want the ball to go in the gutter. You yourself were not a seasoned bowler by any means, but even you were aware that one did not want the bowling ball in the gutter. Though...there was a chance he was just trying to be ironic. But you didn't want to consider that. 

You didn’t believe you had done terribly well by the time your third game was over. However, while it may have been true that against any opponent other than Dave, you probably would have lost miserably, you were playing against Dave, and had easily won the last three games by at least fifty points. The only strike achieved in the past two hours or so was not made by you but him, on a lucky stroke when he happened to drop the ball too early and it actually went in the right direction for once. He bragged about this feat for the rest of the time you spent bowling, as though this fluke somehow made him superior to you, and you let him, because you fully intended to rub it in his face later.

After game three was over, and you and Dave both decided that you had had enough of pointless throwing balls down a strip of flooring, you were starting to think that you were glad you had come after all. The atmosphere wasn’t too stuffy, and the unorganized set up took away the whole pretense of ‘school event’. The two of you grabbed a few refreshments from the snack stand just moments before it closed, and had taken a seat at one of the tables behind your alley, watching as the other students slowly finished their last games and cleared out of the building. Eventually, when Dave’s plate of shitty nanchos was nothing more than a small pile of crumbs and your daily evening coffee was just starting to wear off, even the kids from the student council seemed to be leaving. The place was set to be closing in twenty minutes, and the janitor had been giving you dirty glares from behind his mop for the past half hour or so, so you thought that maybe it was time you got going as well. You began gathering your belongings from the table, reflecting on how great it would finally be to remove this loathsome felt body suit and never put it on again, but right as you were about to head out Latula Pyrope came to rain on your parade.

She was obviously drunk, staggering rapidly towards you. She let out a small giggle as she got closer, followed by a series of light hiccups, and grabbed you firmly by the shoulders. “Heyyy, grasshopperzzzzzz...” Her voice started out in it's usual enthusiastic trill, but she trailed off when she got to the z. Damn, what had been in those water bottles lying around their table? “So, like, we’ve got a game a’ sssspin the bottle goin out back....you two down.......?” She paused very briefly, waiting to see if you actually would answer, and when you didn't she spun around clumsily and sauntered out of the building’s front door.

You turned to Dave, and tried to glare at him so hard it would physically hurt. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but hell no. We are not doing that.” The words escaped your lips no sooner than the door had shut behind Latula. You and Dave stood in semi-awkward silence in the now empty hall, and a quiet grunt from the janitor behind you indicated that it was high time you left the bowling alley. Dave looked as though he were deep in concentration, and seemed... almost content as you left the bowlorama. Then he stopped, abruptly, in the middle of the parking lot before you had made it to the bus stop.

“...I think we should," he said. His face was expressionless, as always, but you could hear the grin in his voice. He grabbed onto the fabric of your costume with one hand and turned as though to head towards the rear side of the building. “...yeah. We should.” He tilted his head to meet your glare full on, and gave you an lopsided, hesitant smirk. “The bus isn’t supposed to get here for another twenty minutes, and this will sure as hell be better than being cooped up in the bus shelter for that long.” Pacing around the side of the building, he gestured for you to follow suit, and after a moment of standing in bewildered silence you did.

“No it won’t!” Your breath was a hiss behind him. “Like hell do I want to have to spend any amount of time with those assholes, let alone fucking kiss anyone! How does that even sound like a remotely good idea to you??” You shook his arm helplessly, hoping maybe it would get him to stop walking, but he shook you off and continued his march.

Sitting behind the building, spread out in a circle on a flat patch of grass was, just as promised, the entire student council, the name 'student council' being applied very, very loosely. You weren't sure if they actually did any school governing, or if they just kind of called themselves that for shits and giggles. Either way, the group was 12 of the most notorious seniors in the entire school. Notorious in a bad way, but not really in a good way either? They were just kind of known by everyone for being exceptionally odd, and kind of fun, and for whatever reason seemed to think that pissing off specifically you and Dave (specifically specifically you) was a riot. Dave for the most part refused to talk about his encounter with one Meenah Peixes, only telling you that he had spent his last ten dollars on a piece of paper that said “baklava”. But you didn't really need any outside proof to know how odd and/or aggravating the seniors were, - your run in with who you now knew to be ‘Kankri’ was mentally scarring enough to drive you far away from him and anyone who might hang out with him.

Let alone kiss them. Holy fuck, why did you let Dave drag you here?

What if you ended up landing on him? Was he even here? And if he was, would he actually be able to shut up about the dangers of teen drinking for two seconds so whoever could--

Okay, no, ew ew ew ew ew NO. Not going there.

An empty plastic bottle sat in the middle of the twelve of them, and it sure as hell wasn't shaped like a something that used to contain soda. In front of it, one of the weirder looking kids, a tall lanky boy wearing purple shorts and carrying a plastic skull, was standing unsteadily and dropping it onto the grass. You watched the bottle as you took a seat in the circle in between a girl named Meulin and the eternally present Dave, and you were probably just imagining it but you swore you could hear as it hit the ground. A boy on the opposite end of the circle, with what had to be the most unnaturally greased up hair you had ever seen and a leather jacket completely inappropriate for weather anywhere in Texas actually dived in front of it, but his head knocked against the plastic as it hit the ground, and it bounced off and landed in Latula’s lap. She appeared to be partially asleep, and grunted at the impact, eyes half lidded as she lined up the tip of the bottle with whoever was across from it, and...

Well, shit. She was sitting straight across from you, wasn’t she?

Upon seeing this, she let out a noise that was somewhere between a cackle and a scream, and chucked the bottle back at the kid in the middle. “Kurlyyyyyyyy!” One of the girls sitting next to her had to hold up her back to prevent her from falling into the grass, but Latula batted her hands away and let herself collapse onto the ground behind her. “You get Karkcrab!” She stared up at nothing in particular, looking pleased with herself.

The kid in the middle of the circle, apparently “curly”, if she had actually used his real name, looked just about as displeased with this selection as you were. Not that you could really see his facial expression. A layer of thin black spandex-y material was stretched across his head, complete with facial bone structures tattooed on in a low quality fabric paint. Who knew, he could have been smiling like a fucking three year old at an amusement park, but his mask made him look distinctly pissed off, and it made you much more comfortable to think that he was dreading this just as much a you. You got up carefully on your feet, walking over to the centre of the circle, and Dave made some sort of a hollering cat call behind you. The kid standing in the middle didn’t walk towards you, but simply stood stiffly with the bottle at his feet, watching. A few cheers erupted from various locations around, and you began to contemplate how you were supposed to reach his lips if he didn’t bend down at all, let alone find them through his mask.

He didn’t seem to take your cues to lower his head a bit more to your height, and, feeling unable to do anything, you stood in an awkward sort of silence for a moment before he...okay, he reached down and patted your head. You were 94% sure that that was not the point of this game at all, but you weren't about to complain. Then, abruptly, he pivoted and walked back to his spot. The circle responded with a couple of ‘woo’s and giggles of approval. Maybe this was a different kind of spin the bottle, you wondered. But your brain quickly answered with a snarky retort, something along the lines of “what, so it’s spin the bottle and sit down?’ and you resisted the urge to smack yourself in the forehead with the offending object.

Eyes watching intently from all around the circle, you stooped to pick the bottle up, and let it go gently at your feet. With a small flick of your wrist, you put a light spin on it, and it hit the ground quietly and stayed there.

What if it was Dave?

Slowly, you let your eyes trail up along the line between the bottle’s cap and your new tormentor, and...okay, no, that was DEFINITELY not Dave. This chick was...oh god, she was terrifying. She stood up, smiling sweetly at you in a way you could only receive as incredibly threatening. Why did she have on fangs? 

"WOOOOOO!" Latula shrieked from the ground. "PORRIM!!! YEAH!!!"

Porrim was wearing a vampire costume, which didn't make her look any less scary, but...she was...tall. Well proportioned. VERY well proportioned. She was wearing a shimmery green-black sleeveless dress with a very low V neck, and had tattoos swirled across her arms and up around her collar bones. And she was looking at you like she was going to absolutely devour you.

You almost whimpered. Apparently, you were just afraid of attractive women.

Your heart was already beating like a hummingbird's, and it picked up pace when the girl...okay, it felt so wrong calling her a girl. But you were kind of almost shaking by the time she was standing in front of you, close enough that you could smell perfume wafting off of her. She too was considerably taller than you, but unlike the other guy she actually did you the courtesy of bending down to your level. You were weirdly surprised to learn that the piercings in her lips were real, and when she pressed them to yours the cold metal stung. 

You couldn't convince yourself to move any, so instead you just stood there and waited for her to let you go...except that she didn't, and the combination of alcohol on her breath and resounding applause from the circle around basically told you why. She made a kind of show of it, delicately cupping your face with one pale hand and running the other up and down your shoulder. It would have been nice, maybe, if you knew her or liked her or actually had any feelings for her at all?? But she was a total stranger, and only seemed to be getting as into it as she was for some kind of drunk aesthetic irony. And then she started sucking on your lower lip.  

You knocked her hands from your face and backed up a few steps, and then cursed yourself out mentally. You hadn’t meant to be that violent about it. But fortunately, she was too inebriated or just too overall weird to be phased, and gave you a light chuckle and one last pucker of her lips before strolling back to her original spot.

Your face more red than it ever could have been from the humidity, you let a hand wander up to your lips, curiously touching where they'd...yeah...just moments ago. You were kind of conflicted, emotionally speaking, but at least on purely a physical basis you guessed the kiss had been nice. You'd never actually kissed anyone in a serious romantic type way before. Though this didn't actually count. 

Dave's upper lip was curled. He seemed to be having trouble looking you in the eyes. “You have lipstick on your face," he laughed, but it wasn't a particularly happy laugh. He was clearly annoyed about something, but you were in absolutely no position to psychoanalyze him at the moment, so you ignored it. 

Quietly next to you, he tore up fistfuls of grass from the dirt. 


	9. The Blue Afghan

It set your teeth on edge.

You didn’t know why, and you didn’t like it, but the scene laid out in front of you made you want to grit and grind every last molar and incisor lining your mouth down to a powdery pulp. You didn’t care if you would have to spend the rest of your life living off of alphaghetti and fucking spit softened arrowroot biscuits. But sitting here, with your ass plastered to damp grass, watching Karkat get slobbered on by Ms. Voluptuous Vampwhore up there? You couldn't get past it without being driven to visions of weird, gross self-injury. 

You could have handled the other kid, the skeletal one in the full body spandex and Juggalo face paint. You could have, because he'd seemed like more the human embodiment of a bad joke than an actual person. Even if they'd actually kissed, it would have been hilarious. You'd have cheered them on. If you took your wife to Disney world, or some shit, and mid-photo op with whatever mascot the guy in the Donald Duck costume started tapping his shiny foam cheek until she kissed it, would you care? Would you be jealous? No. But if the buff, charming, sharp jawed ticket booth salesman pulled the same shit, it would be a very different story. You couldn't cope with him kissing Porrim. 

Okay, wow, so Karkat wasn't your wife, and that was a really stupid and embarrassing thing you just said. Whatever. The point was still the same, even if you explained it in the shittiest and worst way you possibly could have. 

On top of everything else, you were having trouble explaining to yourself why you found all of this so hard to watch. And you were annoyed that all of this emotional turmoil was interrupting your stoic cool kid routine. You knew why it upset you, sure, but that was an issue you hadn't actually dealt with yet. And right now, you were really too distracted to start. The way Karkat was all feeling up his lips afterwards like he had to check and see if they were still there...it just irked you in ways you couldn’t quite put into words. When he had sat down next to you, you tried to just keep from saying anything, knowing that if you did you'd probably speak your mind. 

No matter how many times you tried ignore what was going on, denial was growing tiresome, and you were starting to come to terms with how you actually felt about this whole...thing. What you had originally passed off as an odd sense of friendliness and platonic intrigue was making itself clearly less platonic each time you found yourself contemplating how choice his ass really was, only to realize you were just objectifying him to avoid facing the fact that you actually cared about him. And then there was the fact that you were 99% sure he'd never thought of you as anything more than a buddy/pal/brofriend/whatever. Hell, you weren't sure if he was even willing to admit yet that yeah, you were friends. 

And then a very different part of you quietly encouraged you to pin him to the stupid blue afghan on the bottom bunk of your bed and make him forget he had ever kissed anyone else. 

Yeah, okay, you liked him. You wanted to throw up. 

Taking part in the spin the bottle game had been a bad idea. There was pretty much no chance Karkat would have wanted to go had you not practically dragged him into the circle of seniors, so you had brought all of this discomfort upon yourself. You had basically known that when you started walking off after the group, too, fully aware that Karkat would follow you, fully aware that the bottle would land on him and someone who probably wasn't you would get up there and kiss him and it would make you all kinds of uncomfortable. But you did it anyways. Deep down somewhere, there had been a small voice in your brain (which may or may not have been the same one encouraging hormone fueled sloppy makeouts sessions) that suggested you go for it. That this was an opportunity, albeit a small one, and that the off chance of you spinning and the bottle pointing in his direction, or vice versa, was a good enough reason to play in the first place. That whatever discomfort you may have, it would be worth it if you maybe got a shot too.

But you weren’t so sure anymore.

The rest of the game went by a rush of nervous anticipation. Karkat was only chosen one other time, receiving a sort of spinning hug and smack on the cheek from the same girl who had conned you out of the only money you had a couple months ago. She had seemed pretty pleased with herself when she sat back down, and Karkat didn’t seem anything more than a little bit baffled, and you guessed that one was a little bit less disturbing to you than the first, but your heart still skipped a beat every time mouth of the bottle passed by him. That was about the time when the game fell apart, so he didn't actually spin for another person, maybe possibly because you'd taken it upon yourself to distract him before he could. You'd been randomly selected a few more times than him, ending up with eight people in total, and somehow none of them were him. The first was a slightly unstable kid wearing 3d glasses, followed by a short girl with a cat ear headband, a sleazy guy in a leather jacket who tried to lick your cheek, and a kid in a bright red sweater who told you he'd taken a vow of chastity and could only shake your hand. Then, a white girl in a weird, cropped off kimono who seemed exponentially bored by the whole thing but went in for a French kiss regardless. An extremely muscular dude who vehemently refused to remove the horse mask he had been wearing all night. The hot girl in the blue dress who obviously didn't want to be here. And even Porrim, which struck you with the hope that maybe Karkat would react just like you had to you kissing her. 

Each time you came back from every awkward peck you received, you found yourself painstakingly searching Karkat’s face for the same signs of discomfort or unease you were sure could be found plainly painted across your own features, and were disappointed to see that they were never there.

After about 30 minutes the game devolved from any sort of organized setup to a giggling chat circle, where everyone left their positions to go sit in groups with the others, and people took the bottle and jokingly plopped it down in front of their friends and SOs. The fishy dealer-girl, now known to you as Meenah, came over to you and Karkat and drunkenly tried to hit on him several times. After an hour, when Meenah had fallen asleep on the ground next to Karkat and the kid in the leather jacket was locked in a passionate embrace with a tree, everyone seemed to decide that it was a good time to clear off and go home. The entire group managed to squeeze themselves into the back of a small late night bus, and one short and bumpy ride later you were all let off at the gates of the school. The twelve seniors travelled eastward in their small pack, towards the grade 12 dorms, and you and Karkat went in the opposite direction to the sophomore residential area. You didn’t look at him too much on the walk back, but when you did he looked more tired than usual. Maybe the events of the night were grating on him, too, even if it wasn't quite in the same way it was for you. 

Your mind was long past simply being ‘lost in thought’, and your stupor of jumbled contemplations and unsettlingly romantic musings had taken over your consciousness to the point that you barely even really knew what you were doing when you walked into the dorm building, ascended the various staircases, and unlocked your room’s door. You stumbled through a half assed attempt at a ‘bedtime routine', which meant that you changed into a pair of flannel pajama pants, discarded your shirt in some random dusty corner, halfheartedly brushed your teeth, and splashed a bit of cold water on your face. If you'd been less tired, you might have even said you felt kind of depressed. Not even the frigid tap water really woke you up from your tired inertia, and you were ready as hell to fall into bed and forget the night's events. Now you kind of wished you'd gotten in on all of that senior water bottle action, because this evening would have been way better if you'd just blacked the whole thing. 

You had one foot on the first ladder rung of the bunk bed when a quiet voice from behind you interrupted.

“...Dave.”

It came out as barely more than a mumble, and with a quick turn of your head you could see Karkat standing behind you, staring at the floor. He was wearing some sort of oversized fundraiser t-shirt, matched with a ridiculous pair of dolphin patterned pajama bottoms, and if you didn’t know any better you would have thought he looked nervous.

“Yeah?” You hopped off of the ladder and spun around in sock feet to face him, letting your back lean up against the wooden slats behind you. He had his arms crossed, hands balled into tight fists, and on further inspection you decided he did look apprehensive about something.

“...Uh, well...fuck.” He struggled for words, letting his mouth dangle open as he wracked his brain for the right way to phrase whatever he was about to say, and a wave of agitation ran through you. Had he noticed your reactions during the game earlier? Was this going to be some sort of confrontation? You could hear him in your head already, gingerly spitting out all of the polite words that make up a courteous rejection. He was flattered by your interest. You’re a great guy, Dave. But he has some sort of girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever back home, or he’s the most heterosexual person you will ever meet, or the circumstances aren’t right, or he just finds the shades really off putting but might be willing to consider if you switched to reading glasses, or-

 Karkat cleared his throat, and your head snapped back to him. He had knitted his eyebrows together in a determined glare, and with clenched fists he looked up and oh god here it came fuck you were panicking again and-

“I want to kiss you.”

It took a moment to fully register what he had just said, but when you did, your eyes were fucking dinnerplates.

“Uh.”

That was the only sound you could force yourself to make. Your throat had closed off almost entirely, and you could hear your heartbeat pounding in your ears. A deep red flush creeped over your roommate’s cheeks, and he made a small noise that was a sort of combination of a laugh and a cough, doing his best to look anywhere but at you. Grimacing slightly, he had his left shirt sleeve balled up in his hand. “I know how fucking stupid I sound right now.” His voice was quiet at first, but got both louder and shakier the more he spoke. “But I want to, and I can't stop thinking about how I want to, but it's not like I could just come at you like some kind of kissing wrecking ball and scare the shit out of you if you weren't expecting it, so yeah I'm all kinds of fucking embarrassed right now but I thought it would be better for the both of us if I just-“

You didn't actually decide to lean in and kiss him. It just kind of...happened. His cheeks were bright red, and his mouth was moving at a mile a minute, but you had no idea what to do with all of these things he was saying or how you could possibly respond. Everything about him in that moment was screaming 'fucking God Dave don't let me start babbling' so you did what you had to to shut him up. 

As though the mortifying number of shitty rom coms he'd watched hadn't prepared him for a real life version of the 'shut up and kiss me' trope. Why the hell did he seem so surprised? Like, what was he expecting you to do after saying all that, just go 'that's cool, bro'? Turn him down? Did he have any fucking idea how much you thought about this every day? Jesus, Karkat was an oblivious fuck. You tried to keep your hands planted firmly on his lower back, because if you didn't concentrate on that they'd be under his shirt in a matter of seconds. But no, you didn't want to scare him off. 

He was frozen in place for a moment, still getting over the shock of his feelings being reciprocated, apparently. But then he relaxed, and the awkward stillness passed. He started kissing you back, and you had to pause for a breath embarrassingly early on because you felt like you were going to choke on your lungs otherwise. He was still hesitant, sure, because Karkat was never really sure of anything he was doing, but it didn't matter because he was touching you back. You were infinitely thankful you weren't wearing a shirt again, because when he slid his hands off of your shoulder blades and around to the front of your chest, the feeling of his fingers on your skin was way more satisfying than felt appropriate. God, he actually did want this. He was so sweet about it, too, all pressing his nose against your cheek like your faces weren't close enough already. 

You took a step forward, and then another, and he seemed to get the gist of where you were going with this, because he did you the courtesy of falling onto the bottom bunk when you got there so that wouldn't have to ask politely. There was nothing to be polite about right now. You kept pushing his hair away from his face, feeling his cheeks burning under your fingertips. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands, because he just kept running them up and down your torso, along the contours of your back and across your ribs and down and down until, painfully, he decided it was time to move them back up again. Even so you kept fucking moaning, all breathy and quiet, into his ear, too distracted to be embarrassed by it. 

"Is that seriously all you want to do?" you breathed, somewhere between his neck and his shoulder.

He swallowed. "Not really," he whispered, and like you'd been waiting to do for the past two minutes (two months?) you slid your right hand under the waistband of his pajama pants.   
   
You pinned him down on that stupid blue afghan on the bottom bunk and damn if you weren’t make him forget the whole fucking night. 


	10. Leonardo DeCaprio is Everything a Girl Could Ever Want

This was your fifth cinnamon roll.

You had taken a total of six, piled atop a foam plate from the school cafeteria in a leaning tower of pastry, and each of the five other kids in the room were making sure you knew they were shooting you disturbed glances. But you didn't even have the energy to flip them off. At that point in the morning, you were still barely awake enough to pick up on what was going on around you, and you hadn't even thought to pout yourself a steaming cup of machine coffee. Maybe that was why you took six cinnamon rolls.

You decided that this would be a time of personal reflection for you. Because damn, you needed it.

The entire morning prior had kind of been a blur. You had woken up with Dave in your bed. Again. This time, you managed not to throw a temper tantrum, which didn't even make sense given the compared severity of what had happened between this night and the last one. But seeing him there was still awkward as hell. You had just spent the previous night...jeeeesuuuuus . What were you supposed to have done upon waking up next to him? Roll over and cuddle up to him and smile like an idiot? This wasn't one of your romantic comedies. Had you just had a fucking one night stand? Did Dave actually like you in that way or had he just gotten horrifically drunk last night while you weren't looking? Had you been drunk? What else could have possibly convinved you to just declare your love for him like that? You didn't know what to do.  
Honestly, you weren't even sure what you wanted.

You considered a variety of things as you gulped down the last couple bits of cinnamon roll number five and started into number six. What was the resounding message in all of the romance movies you held so dear? Always marry for love? Nothing ever ends at a one night stand? Leonardo DeCaprio is everything a girl could ever want?

No. 'Go for what you want, no matter what it takes'. Jonah Baldwin travelled all the way from Seattle to New York City without his father's permission in an attempt to pair up his dad and a woman he only knew through a heartfelt letter. Were you going to be such a pussy that you would let a little bit of doubt and self loathing prevent you from going after what you wanted?

But that was the problem. You didn't know if you really wanted Dave. Rom comcs also told you to 'follow your heart', and you had yet to figure out whether or not your heart was really in it at all. Sure, maybe he was unfairly pretty, and a really nice jaw, and weird freckles all over his arms and back, and half the time you saw him you had trouble not just out and out kissing him like you had last night, but who could be sure that wasn't just a product of teen hormones? Whenever he told one of his stupid ironic jokes, or started rapping under his breath when he thought you couldn't hear, you were torn between wanting to kiss him and deck him. What kind of love was that?

You had never actually had any legitimate romantic relationships before, aside from a couple of recess marriages in grade school (and even then, usually you were the one organizing the ceremonies, rather than partaking in them). So how were you supposed to know what to do when confronted with oncoming teenage romance? No number of movies could have prepared you for the real thing.

You were conflicted, to say the least.

You were halfway through your sixth and final cinnamon roll when you started to feel incredibly sick. Maybe even a growing teenage boy couldn't handle six full sized pastries. Your stomach was gurgling, and your stomach felt like it was close to bursting, making it hard to focus on the topic at hand. You had caught the attention of the entire cafeteria now, you, the boy who had devoured five and a half cinnamon rolls in one sitting. To your annoyance, they picked up on your sudden discomfort, and a few nerdy looking kids at one of the tables in the corner started giggling behind their biology textbooks. You tried to send a cold glare their way, but failed completely due to the fact that you were clutching your stomach and grimacing at the same time, and they just giggled more.

Using all of the arm strength you could muster, you pulled yourself up from the table and hobbled off towards the men's room. The two plates you had needed to carry all six cinnamon rolls were knocked off of the table in your effort, but you didn't turn around. Shoving a worried freshman out of the way, you slammed through the washroom door and locked yourself in one of the stalls.  
Three minutes later, you emerged with a raw throat, a settled stomach, and a serious distaste for cinnamon rolls. Maybe next time you would think twice before drowning your sorrows in food.

No longer distracted by a towering stack of food, only now did you realise just how tired you were. After all, it must have been later than 1 am when you finally fell asleep last night, and you had woken up at five. Not that you'd never survived a day on less, but with the conflicting emotions and sudden nausea, 'disabling exhaustion' wasn't the nicest addition.

Case in example: it took you fifteen pumps to realize the soap dispenser at the sink wasn't working, and you accidentally cranked the temperature of the water up to the hottest setting available and in your kneejerk reaction to "oh my god my hands are burning" you then cranked it back down to the lowest setting possible. By the time you got the the paper towel dispenser, you were a mess.

Damn. These things. You had always hated these things. You could never find the sensors, or they always stopped functioning whenever you got near them, or they would give you ten paper towels when triggered rather than one. Of course, this had to be the only modern thing they installed in these otherwise archaic bathrooms. The motion detector was fairly obvious, fortunately for you, a big red dot in the center of the thing with an illustration of a woman's hand over top of it. Cautiously, you waved your palm in front of it. Nothing happened. Not that you were expecting anything better. Machines hated you, as you had learned many a time (revolving door, anyone?). With a loud sigh, you tried again. And again. And again. Each time, the machine made a small 'whirr' noise, and then shut down. You could see the paper towels. They were in there, all right. You waved your hand in front of it again. Fuck. Nothing. You were going to get those damned things out if you had to disassemble the machine with your own two hands.

Your annoyance built up like steam in a tea kettle. You waved your hand in front of it one more time, more violently than before. This time, the machine whirred twice. Still no paper towels, though. God damn, today of ALL POSSIBLE DAYS. You pounded your hand against it. It whirred three times. You were still trying to be gentle with the thing, in the most aggressive way you could. After all, you weren't intent on breaking it. The school would probably fine you if you did, and you didn't even want to think of the hell you'd get from your dad if that happened. You slammed your palm on the sensor again. This was no longer about drying your hands. This was about proving man's superiority over machine. This was about winning over an insolent device, and getting what you wanted. This was a power struggle.

You pulled your hand back. Summoning all of the strength you could muster, you clenched your fingers into a fist, and took a swing. Your knuckles made contact with the sensor, and holy fuck did it ever hurt. The machine whirred fifteen times, and even though you were preoccupied with clutching your poor bleeding hand and swearing at the pain, you made sure to count. It whirred seventeen more times. Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit. You had broken it, hadn't you. You stood up, desperately trying to ignore your throbbing knuckles for a moment, and grabbed at the machine. You pounded on the top of it with your free fist. It kept whirring. "Shut...the fuck...up!"

 With the last syllable, and the last pound, the machine did as a matter of fact shut up. Great. It could understand English. You felt a tiny bit accomplished.

But just as you turned away from it, the dispenser started whirring again. And not like before. It had now started into one long, continuous whirr, like a dysfunctional printer. You let out an equally long "Fuuuuuck." It was less of a yell, and more of a sob, as you watched the dispenser begin to let out one unending paper towel. The paper bunched up as it hit the floor, slowly filling the corner and crumpling, and you were just about to start banging your head on the wall in despair when a voice came from behind you.

"Yo, kid."

You spun around, sudden embarrassment flushing through your cheeks. Someone else had been here? How long? And why did they sound like a girl...?

Well, maybe because it was a girl. You hadn't seen too many boys who wore fucashia lipstick.

Meenah Peixes. You recognized her. And, oh for fuck's sake, she'd been one of the ones you'd kissed last night, too. At least that one haad just been on the cheek. She was one of the ones from the stupid bowling party last night, the same one who had conned Dave out of ten dollars a few weeks ago and used a whole bunch of fish related pick up lines on you. Student council president, apparently. She was kind of unnerving.

"Uhhh...hi." You had to yell in order not to be drowned out by the malfunctioning dispenser. "...the ladies room is next door."

She giggled a bit. God, you wanted to die. You raised one fist behind you and gave the machine a final punch. It made a 'skreeeeek' sort of noise and started spitting out paper towels more quickly than before. Meenah refrained from giggling any more this time, and rather looked on with an unamused expression. "Nice one." Her lips curled up into a small smile. "You gonna leave the crime scene already or what?"

You looked back at the mess of paper towels behind you. "Uhhh...what?"

Meenah shook her head, clearly disappointed at who the hell knew what. "Look, I get that you're emoceanally fishtraught, but you need to get the shell out of here before somebody finds you."

You squinted at her. You hadn't been able to understand half of the things she was saying the previous night, but you had chalked that up to her being drunk. "...fish...what?" Apparently her incoherency went past intoxication.

She grabbed you by the arm with a bony hand. "Save your questfins for later. Let's move."

You barely protested. After all, what did you have to lose? An opportunity to drown in paper towels? She led you over to the window on the far end of the room, then let go of you and grabbed the toilet plunger from underneath one of the sinks. There didn't appear to be any way to open the window, and as soon as you realised what she was about to do you backed up as quickly as you could and pressed yourself against the wall. She reeled back, holding the plunging end down and the metal handle up, and took a swing for the window.

You closed your eyes before the impact, but hearing all of the shattering glass was enough. "WHAT THE FUCK?" you cried, carefully opening your eyes. None of the glass had hit you, thank god, but in between the paper towel and shards of window on the floor the bathroom was a mess. By the time you turned your gaze to where the window used to be, Meenah was already through it, one black sneaker disappearing through the gaping hole in front of you. She turned around, extending a hand through the opening. "You coming or what, crabstick?"

Stepping carefully over paper towels and glass, you made your way over to her. "I'm gonna fucking cut myself if I go through there." It was more of a whine than a proper protest.

"Just get up on the sink and do a fuckin superman dive or somefin. If you don't get outta here now, some prof is gonna find ya and lecture ya until your ears shrivel up and die. Believe me, I know." She wiggled her extended arm a bit. "Now hurry up!"

"Yeah, they'll lecture me because they'll think I broke the fucking window!" you shouted. But, cautiously, you did as she said, hoisting yourself up on the sink and pulling your body through the window frame. You refused to take her hand, but she just snorted a bit and pulled you up anyways, and you managed to come out with only one cut on your knee. You were still pretty annoyed with that, but the moment you opened your mouth to complain Meenah had slapped a hand over it and told you to man up.

After you got out of the washroom, fish girl started leading you off down the wet hill in front of you, into a section of the campus you had never been before. It was the maintenance part, the place where all of the janitor's quarters and cleaning supply closets were. You had never really had reason to go in there before, and you were more than a little curious about where she was taking you, but you decided it would be in your best interests not to ask. After all, she'd probably just respond with another fish pun, and you'd be nowhere closer to getting answers than you were before.

"...where are we going?" you blurted. So much for not asking, stupid curiosity. She smiled back at you, walking behind a tall concrete building.

"To my undersea kitchen fortress," she giggled. Clearly, she wasn't about to give you an actual answer. But you were barely paying attention to her now, and more to your surroundings. She had led you behind what was apparently the 'master control room', ducked into a tiny alcove off the back of it, and the two of you were now descending a dimly lit staircase. The place smelled a little like dust, and a lot like bread, and for a moment you wondered if she hadn't been joking about the kitchen fortress thing.

At the bottom of the staircase, there was a heavy gray door with a fancy card-lock system on the handle. Meenah bent down, pulled out a pink plastic thing from her pocket and inserted it into the door, which swung open with a click.

...she hasn't been joking about the underground bakery, because what you had just walked into was an underground bakery if you had ever seen one. The room itself was entirely made of concrete, but the walls had been given a sloppy purple paint job, and someone had thrown down about fifty carpets on the floor. With heaters running in all corners of the room the place almost looked cozy. One if the walls was covered in ovens and counters and fridges, and on the other side miscellaneous sofas and coffee tables were laid out, the two halves being divided by a large metal counter in the middle of the room. There weren't too many people there, aside from a few seniors (namely Porrim and, oh god, Kankri), and, sitting in the back of the room, at one of the tables in the corner was Dave.

Well. Shit.


	11. These Fucking Kids

They'd given you the kind of black coffee that had a thin layer of tan coloured foam on the top, swirling around amongst dark liquid in tiny bubbles. Well, you were sure there was a more technical coffee snob term for that, but you were as far from a coffee snob as a person could get, and that was the best description you could come up with. It looked like a tiny galaxy contained in your cup, with sweeping clouds of space dust and little stars. There wasn't a doubt in your mind that this was going to be the best cup of coffee you had ever had; so good that you wouldn't even have to choke it down, but would instead savour every sip and mourn for it's loss when it was gone. 

Lip curled downwards, you pushed the mug away from you, with a little more force than was probably appropriate. A good amount sloshed over the rim and seeped into the tablecloth. "Get this out of here," you grumbled. "I want a fucking latte."

For what had to be the fiftieth time that day, Porrim Maryam's chest swooshed past your face, as she leaned down to pick up your mug. You were pretty sure she was doing it on purpose. "Somebody's panties are in a bunch," she cooed. You watched as she stood back up again, worried that her hair was going to fall into the cup or something. But, of course, it didn't, and you saw her take a couple of sips from it as she made her way back into the kitchen. "Miss Strider wants a latte," she said to someone behind the counter. You were screaming inside.

The entire morning had been one big, confusing blur. 

It started right from the moment you woke up. Earlier than usual, by about an hour, without the help of Karkat's fire engine alarm. It was still too dark to see anything, but you were awake enough to know that your bed was empty, and to remember that it hadn't been the previous night. Someone was bustling around in the dark off to your right, but looking at them would mean moving, which you were still too sleepy to do. You just assumed it was Karkat. God, hopefully he wasn't flipping out like he had that last time. 

"Babe," you called out, knowing full well he wouldn't appreciate the pet name. "Come back to bed. Strider's cold."

"Get used to it, cool kid," a voice murmured. 

You sat straight up. 

That was a girl's voice. Sure, maybe Karkat could be a little pitchy at times, but that was definitely not him. Very slowly, you turned around to face the intruder. That shitty sword was still lying under your bed, wasn't it?

Meenah Peixes stood in front of your door, surrounded in shoes. Your shoes. She had broken into your collection and dumped them all over the fucking floor. On her left foot was the Nike Hyperdunk, on her right was the runner with the light up sole you bought when you were in grade 5. Both were too big for her, and she looked unsteady. Laces were tangled everywhere across the ground. You couldn't move. 

"Hey, Strider," she said, giving you an absent wave. "You got any heels?" It felt like she was looking through you. Suddenly self conscious you smoothed your hair down on your head, and reached for your shades on the bedside table. Except...wait, they weren't there. You'd left them in the bathroom last night, hadn't you. Damn it, Karkat. 

"Check the other bin," you said, squinting at her through the dark. What was she doing here? You were legitimately worried. Meenah was probably the shadiest character you had ever met. Had she come for more money? You didn't have any more money. The ten dollars you gave her was legitimately the only cash you had, not counting the dime that had been kicking around the bottom of your backpack for a few months now. Shit, maybe she was going to try and make you pay in shoes. No way in hell were you doing that. Give up the Air Jordan rip offs for a single slip of paper? What the hell did this chick want from you?

She frowned briefly, then kicked off the shoes. "No," she muttered, "it's not like he's really gonna give much of a fish what's on your feet anyways." And then she was moving towards you all of a sudden, reaching out, and you tried to back up, but -- oh, okay. She tapped you on the head with one finger. "It's the hair that counts," she said. You shivered. A few steps more, and she was standing in front of your dresser. You watched in horror as she flung the drawers open one by one and started digging through them. 

A pair of jeans landed on the foot of your bed, followed by one of your many ironic phrase t-shirts, and a pair of socks. Meenah paused, then slid the drawer shut and turned to you. "I'm not gonna go looking through your intimates," she said, "but I suggest you put on some different boxers of somefin. Just to be polite."

You blinked at nothing and everything at once. She smirked. "Meet me in the water closet in five." Then she giggled, and disappeared into the bathroom. 

Best not overthink it, you told yourself. Just do what she says. As you pulled on the clothes she'd given you, you debated with yourself as to whether or not this was something sexual. One part of your brain said 'it probably is', another part said 'I sure as shit hope not'. Though you couldn't deny the thought had crossed your mind once or twice. Something about the fish puns was bizarrely enticing. 

Now fully dressed, you stepped into the bathroom with caution. You were trying your best not to be too nervous. In your head, you went over the deep breathing techniques Bro taught you during his yoga videos phase, but they hardly helped. What was it, breathe in for 8 seconds and out for 12? No, that couldn't be it. You ran out of lung space by six. The light in the bathroom was bright, and, blinking a few times, you looked up into the grinning face of Meenah. 

She held a tube of hair gel tightly in her right hand, and a comb in her left. "Just go sit on top of the toilet, kay?" she said, gesturing to it. "I'm gonna fix you up."

You did as she told you. "Why are you styling my hair?" you asked. But the only response she gave was to kind of stab you in the side of the head with the comb. You couldn't see what she was doing, but you were 99% sure she was using five times more hair gel than she needed to, and by the end of this whole thing, you'd look like a wet cat. God knows that was probably what she found attractive. You just sat there as she went back and forth, comb, hair gel, towel, hair dryer...? comb again, and so on. 

After about ten minutes, she clapped her hands together and took a step back. "That should be good," she giggled. Almost reluctant to look, you stood up, and turned to face yourself in the mirror. 

By some miracle, your hair looked smoother than it ever had. Your bangs fell across your forehead in a such a way that they were divided in all of the right places, like one of Bro's fucking anime guys, but the strands didn't look stuck together. The whole thing somehow managed to look rustled up but orderly at the same time. 

You didn't know how she did it, but you sure as hell didn't want to thank her. So instead, you blushed, reached for your shades, and positioned them on your face. Ah, there. The world looked much more comfortable in that familiar darkened tone. 

Meenah clapped you on the shoulder. "Lookin good. Now let's get out of here. You've got places to be."

Again, it was better not to ask. You sighed, and followed her out of your room. 

You had known it was pretty early in the morning simply based on the state of drowsy delirium you had been in when Meenah dragged you from your bed, but you hadn't known it was this early. This was, like, 6 am early. You didn't think you had gotten up at this time of day in years, not counting the day you and your Bro took the trip down to this school in the first place. Exhausted, or maybe just trying to act like you were in hopes that fish girl would let you go back to bed, you followed her across the courtyard with long, sluggish steps, as though you were dragging a body behind you through the wet grass.

After a certain amount of time (not like you were actually watching where you were going) and way too much effort on your part, Meenah stopped walking. For the first time in minutes, you looked up and took in your surroundings, only to realize you'd somehow gotten down two entire flights of stairs without even noticing. You had no idea where you were. The walls around you were concrete, you couldn't see the courtyard from where you were standing, and in front of you was a heavy looking gray door with some sort of a scanner over the handle.

You blinked around dumbly, too tired to actually feel nervous. "So....this is the part where you pull out the FBI badge and tell me I've been selected for--"

You were speaking so slowly and with such a long drawl that she cut you off. "There's that Texas accent," she said. "You should pull that out more often. The ladies would fishin love it."

Meenah grinned at you, obviously aware of the irony of what she had just said. She cleared her throat, gestured to the door, and stepped back. "Have at it," she said. 

You just stared. Some part of you was reluctant to even ask what the fuck she was talking about. Maybe it would be best if you were to just straight up turn around and leave. "What," you said, not bothering to add a question mark to the intonation of it. "You mean this card scanner thing? Or do you want me to kick it in?"

"Ooo, you're so sarcastic. That's gotta be at least a third degree burn. Better wrap up the affected area and elevate it above heart level before you call the hospital."

What the fuck. "Please tell me what's going on," you groaned. As much as you liked doling out vague irony, you hated being the victim of it. 

"The scanner, fish brain." Meenah tapped her foot against the concrete floor, summoning up mini storms of dust around her heels. "You should know what to do with it. Put the card in." 

Did she want a credit card or something? The greedy fish chick wasn't satisfied with just taking all of your cash, she wanted your bank account too? Now mildly distressed, you reached out and rattled the door handle.

"Oh my Cod, Dave." Meenah rolled her eyes, but abruptly her features fell into more serious order. "Think. What is the only thing I've ever given to you?" 

She...holy shit. 

"Oh my god," you hissed. You sounded like you were being strangled. You actually had the fucking thing on you. Ever since buying it, you'd taken to carrying it around in your pocket, just in case the opportunity ever came to actually get whatever it was you had paid for. "I...you didn't fucking _give this to me_

"I peer pressured you into buying it, and you forgot what you learned in health class about not purchasing mystery substances from fishy individuals?" She frowned. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Put the card in the door."

It was kind of crumpled, and a few spots around the corner were yellow from where Karkat had spilled orange juice on it a week ago. And-- fuck. Where was Karkat? You'd been so distracted by Meenah fucking around with your shoes and hair and stuff that you hadn't even really registered that he was nowhere to be seen when you woke up. 

God, you hoped he hadn't panicked again. It had been terrifically awkward the last time, and then the events of the previous night had only been ambiguously romantic. This time, no number of 'no homo's could take the situation back anywhere close to platonic. Plausible deniability was a thing of the past. You could only imagine how freaked out he might be. 

But there was a very real chance that if you tried to leave now, Meenah might knock you out and drag your unconscious body into whatever was behind that door anyways. So, feeling defeated, you smoothed out the card, dusted off the pocket lint clinging to it's edges, and put it into the slot. 

Similarly to a door in a hotel room, there was a small click, and a green light flashed above the scanner. Meenah, grinning like a Cheshire Cat, turned the handle and let the door fall open, then stepped in.

You followed behind her slack jawed into Meenah Peixes'  Underground Undersea Bakeshoppe Extraordinaire.

The first thing that hit you was the heat. Stepping into the building felt a bit like stepping into a campfire, in an oddly comfortable way. It looked a little like a coffee shop, a little like a lounge, and a lot like the sort of place that would sell incense and spiritual healing books. There was a space heater running in each corner of the room. It probably would have been pretty cold otherwise, as the entire place was made of concrete, but whoever decorated it seemed to have tried to compensate for the basement-feel by dumping dark purple paint on the walls and covering the floor with 50+ exotic rugs. One wall was lined with booths with velvety seats, overflowing with decorative pillows. On the other wall, there was a long counter, behind which there appeared to be some sort of kitchen. 

Porrim from last night was there, leaning over one of the tables in a way obviously intended to squish her boobs into the surface. Kankri Vantas, looking tense, lurked behind her. Sitting in an armchair near the counter and reading a book was the bored chick in the blue dress that you'd kissed last night. Meenah, making her way over to the counter, signalled to her. 

"Yo, Aranea," she half-shouted. "Get the cool kid a baklava, hey?" And then, a bit quieter, "Make sure it's one of the pretty ones. Would you believe he paid ten bucks for it?" 

She totally wanted you to hear that. 

Aranea looked up from her book, eyebrows knit behind the round frames of her glasses in annoyance. "I'm not actually your employee, you know." She looked like her voice should be nasally, but it wasn't. "Why don't you get it yourself?" 

Meenah groaned. "Yeah, yeah. Barnacle." She retreated into the kitchen, stomping for dramatic effect. 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Aranea yelled, but she never got an answer. 

You drifted around the restaurant for a few minutes, closely inspecting the whirring heaters and frayed rugs, just so that you didn't look awkward standing around by the door. Briefly you made eye contact with Porrim, who winked at you, so you made sure not to get anywhere near the booth she was at. Instead, you settled on the one in the corner. The seat sunk down a few inches with you, surprisingly being as comfortable as it looked. 

As though that made this any better. 

You wanted to ask again why you were here, but at this point you had said that so many times that it didn't sound like a real sentence anymore.

Meenah reemerged from the kitchen, carrying-- shockingly-- a piece of baklava on a delicate China plate. She made her way over to your table, almost bouncing as she walked, and set it down, alongside a tiny fork. Both hands pressed against the table, she looked down at you and grinned. "So," she said. "How does it feel to finally get your dollar's worth?" 

That had to be a rhetorical question, because she knew you weren't answering that. Instead, you stared down at the pastry in front of you, kind of wishing you could throw it at her. _That's the only way the ten bucks could be worth it_ , you thought. 

"Well, anywaves. You just stay put, I've gotta go find somebody." She paused to cackle. "Maybe if you can keep your fins off of that delicious piece of baking, you two can share it when he gets here." And with that, she walked out of the bakery. 

The door thudded shut behind her. "Who is 'he'?" you tried to yell, but your voice was lost in the hum of the nearest heater. 

Share it? Like hell you were splitting your ten dollar baklava with anyone. You were eating the whole fucking thing yourself.

_How long will they have to hold me here before it's considered kidnapping?_ you contemplated, shovelling the first piece of baklava into your mouth. _How long before I develop stockholme syndrome and never want to leave?_  

The pastry was gone in under a minute. "That wasn't worth ten dollars," you said, to no one in particular, but inside you knew it was. You'd probably pay ten more just to have another slice, if only you had the money. 

And...oh, shit. Somehow, you'd summoned Kankri. You didn't actually see him head on as he approached your booth, but you didn't have to. The ominous blur of red visible out of the corner of your eye was enough. 

"Ahem." He announced himself as he slid into the booth next to you by clearing his throat. 

"Jesus, Kankri!" You faked a gasp. "What the fuck are you trying to do here? You know onomatopoeias are a trigger for me, right?" 

Kankri stared at you, trying impossibly hard to figure out if you were being serious or not. 

"Very well, Dave," he finally said, folding and unfolding his hands in his lap. "I will not let your continual sarcasm allow me to disacknowledge what could be a very real and painful trigger for you. You may rest assured that absolutely no more onom-- forgive me, I should say 'o words' will be present in this conversation." 

"Well fuck, okay, dude. But watch it. You won't like me when I'm triggered." Some part of your unconscious brain made you swear even more than usual around Kankri, just to try and piss him off. 

"Anyways," he said. "I overheard your criticism of the price of this baked good you received, and I wanted you to know that--" he leaned over the table, looking deeply into your eyes. "I empathize with your troubles. If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to share with you some famous anti-capitalism quotations that perhaps you could relate to and find comfort in." 

You felt an urge to punch yourself in the face.  _Kill me_.

"Fantastic!" Kankri clapped several times. "I believe it would be best to start with this line from American rap legend and Presidential candidate Waka Flocka Flame, that is: 'Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.' Now, from what I know of your situations this quotation is very relevant to what you are going through right now. To explain the analogy, Miss Peixes would be the oppressive capitalist system, and you would be the underpaid blue collar worker." He made a variety of gestures on the table to illustrate this point. "I believe you were peer pressured into paying an unreasonable sum of money for a much cheaper product, and that is absolutely unnacceptable. However, this is an inevitable characteristic of the capitalist society we live in. The only solution..."

He kept talking, but you stopped listening. Jesus, he was verging on real subject matter. Now seemed a better time than any to see if you could get the fuck out of here. Maybe he wouldn't notice if you just kind of got up, and...

Your train of thought was unexpectedly severed as you crashed face first into someone's cleavage.

Alarmed, you stumbled backwards into the booth. "Oh my god," you whispered.  Your brain kept flipping between being pleased and traumatized. Porrim. 

"Sorry, honey," she said, smiling sweetly down at you. "I can't let you leave just yet. Would you like a coffee while you wait for Meenah to get back?"

"Where is she?" You demanded. "Who is she going to get?" 

"I'll get you a coffee," Porrim answered, and fled into the kitchen. 

Slowly, you sat up, rubbing your face at the point of collision. "Damn it."

"You know," Kankri interjected, raising his index finger in the air, "I've always held the personal belief that caffeine should be an illegal substance. It says in the D.A.R.E weekly abuse report that..."

And that's where you had been for the past half an hour. Kankri moved from the criminalization of caffeine, to that one study that claimed Oreos were more addictive than cocaine (he agreed with it wholeheartedly), to a variety of KFC related conspiracies, eventually ending on something vague and angry about raw veganism that you only half listened to. Porrim Maryam slaved over a hot espresso machine for ten minutes to make the most beautiful and rich looking cup of black coffee you'd ever been presented with, and you'd shoved it away like it was a mug of spilled oil. The space heaters kept on whirring. 

It was a very cliched time to try and be introspective, as you sipped your first latte in years in this bizarre underground fish hippie lounge, but you couldn't really be bothered to give a shit. 

For everything Karkat may have been freaking out over at that exact moment, you found the situation conversely simple. You liked him, and unless he was inexplicably lying to you last night he liked you too. He was cute in more ways than one, and being around him was a good time, shouting and ranting included. Sure, maybe you didn't have the fairytale married couple rom com love that Karkat might have required to be comfortable in starting a relationship with anyone, but did you really need that? There weren't any options to debate here, as far as you could see it. You were going to keep going after this, and Karkat would just have to be down with that. 

You weren't quite expecting him to be shoved through the bakery door. 

Though in retrospect, you probably knew somewhere deep down that he was who Meenah was talking about when she said she was going to get 'him'. She'd made it clear in the past that Karkat was her favourite of the two of you. "I only would have swindled him out of a five," she told you once, and that may have been the cruelest thing she'd ever said. Of course if she had you here she'd be dragging him along too. 

The expression on his face made him look simultaneously disgruntled and amazed, which was actually a fairly common look of his. He hadn't noticed you yet, but when he did, the disgruntled clearly started winning out. He was still in the t shirt he'd worn to bed, matched with a pair of your tropical fruit patterned pajama pants that he definitely hadn't had on the previous night. Meenah nudged him forward, far more gently than she would have if that had been you. 

"...Dave," he mumbled. He couldn't make eye contact, he just kept staring down at the rug. Taking him by the arm, Meenah guided him over to the booth, and gestured for him to sit down. 

The light from the candle burning in the centre of the table only served to accentuate the rings under his eyes. "Karkat," you replied, fully aware of how awkward you sounded. Why couldn't you say something sensible right now? You didn't even feel nervous, so why couldn't you talk?

Meenah dragged a chair across the bakery and positioned it backwards in front of your table, then sat down, arms crossed over it's back and her legs hanging over the sides. That girl really had intimidation down to an art. "Okay, here's the deal, guys," she said. None of you looked at each other. 

"Now," she started, "I'll admit that me and my friends may like to play a bit of matchy maker on occasion. But you two clownfish are way beyond that. Take this as more of an interventfin." 

You could just tell Karkat was mentally comparing this a movie. He wouldn't have looked so curious otherwise. 

"Anyways. Last night was fuckin painful to watch, with you two making gooey eyes at each other over the spin the bottle that whole time. And I know after that you went back to your room and you fucked or whatever, and I know that fucked you up." 

"Holy shit," Karkat said. A tiny bit of a blush managed to creep through his otherwise dark cheeks. "How do you even--"  
But whatever he was trying to say was drowned out by your onslaught of giggling. 

Meenah shushed the both of you. "So then this morning, I find--" she patted Karkat on the shoulder-- "this idiot in the cafeteria, binge eating cinnamon rolls and fistfighting a paper towel dispenser. And then there's this idiot--" she elbowed you violently-- "muttering about your ass in his sleep." 

"She is a dirty liar," you tried to say, but Meenah just elbowed you again. 

"How the shell would you know? Take it as a compliment, Crabby." 

"...oookaaay." Karkat shifted around in his seat. "So what are we supposed to be doing here, exactly?" 

"Well, you were supposed to be sharing a baklava, but I see Dave ate it already." She tapped your plate with the tiny fork to scold you. "I don't know, guys. Just talk it out. So you can stop being such idiots all of the time. I'll leave you to it." 

And she pulled the chair back across the floor with a screeching noise, leaving you and Karkat alone with the empty plate of baklava. 

The candlelight was highlighting all of his best features, and actually having him here in front of you made you feel a little more relaxed. He kept looking at you, then immediately glancing back down at the table, like he wanted to see you but couldn't manage to make eye contact for more than a few seconds. You took it as a good sign.

"How many cinnamon rolls did you eat, exactly?" you asked, and he laughed sheepishly. 

"Not that it should fucking matter, but I almost got through six," he muttered.

"Holy shit. Those ones from the cafeteria? Those are huge." 

"I wanted to see if emotional eating was something that worked for me." 

"And?" You were both grinning, in spite of yourselves. 

"I think I'd rather guzzle a gallon of petrol than ever fucking taste cinnamon again." 

"Well, shit. I think that baklava had cinnamon in it." You nudged him. "So how about I go brush my teeth, and once I'm minty fresh then you can kiss me?" 

From across the room, Meenah barked out a deafening laugh, and only to be shushed by Kankri. Karkat cringed. "Oh my God, Dave," he grumbled. "This is cheesy as shit." 

"Well, Karkat. This is your life. _You are the cheese_ , and the cheese is you. We are now officially a mother fucking romantic comedy, and there's nothing you can do about it. How does that make you feel?" 

"I can't believe I actually like you," he said, and then he leaned in.

••• 

Across the bakery, you were Meenah, and Meenah had been laughing for more than five minutes now. Porrim had taken to rubbing your back and trying to whisper calming things to you, but you absolutely couldn't stop. 

" _These fucking kids_ ," you wheezed. There were tears running down your cheeks. "This is so lame!!! Is it weird that this is making me feel proud? Fuck." 

Kankri gently laid one hand on your arm, reminding you to use polite language when in polite company, and then Porrim was laughing too. 

Dave and Karkat were leaning so far over the candle on the table that they were dangerously close to catching fire, but right then they were far too preoccupied to care. Maybe if they did, you'd consider giving them a complementary piece of baklava, on the house. 

Maybe. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote.


End file.
